Some gardeners just don’t dig the hori hori

I’ve recently become aware of a serious divide in the gardening community, one that comes down to the very identity of a gardener. And that is whether you swear by a hori hori or not.

Hori horis, or soil knives, (hori hori is said to translate to “dig dig”), are the preferred tool for many gardeners, so much so that they wear them on their hip, much like Hollywood motorcycle gang members wear patches on their leather jackets.

But there is a faction of gardeners who don’t “dig” a hori hori quite as much. Great Dixter’s head gardener Fergus Garrett was the first I’d heard made a distinction between the two camps of gardeners. 

It’s generally not a good idea to take a position almost certain to alienate 50% of your audience, but I’m ready to go on the record with my stance on this important issue. Hori horis are pretty good tools for doing a lot of things fairly well and a lousy tool for doing anything very well.

Which I guess puts me in the anti-hori hori camp.

This might come as a surprise to longtime readers of this column, who may recall a column dedicated to my love for a good soil knife. I can’t bring myself to revisit it, but I suspect I made an embarrassing declaration that I couldn’t garden without one. 

I’d like to credit this mea culpa to a few more years of gardening experience and the discovery of better tools, but it was a throbbing arm that woke me up in the middle of the night a couple years ago that opened my eyes, literally. The hori hori, it turns out, is ironically extremely inefficient at anything approximating digging, and trying to dig holes for small plug plants with a combination of poking, pulling and twisting ended up being a combination that required a chaser of ibuprofen.

I still own a soil knife­ — the orange-handled version from A.M. Leonard is still my favorite — and call it into service for very specific weeding jobs, but I have found a better tool for everything else I used to use it for. 

Planting small plants is much easier and efficient using a long-handled trowel with a large triangle or heart-shape head. Weeding small areas or making a groove to sow seeds works much better with a Cobrahead weeding tool. Cutting twine is much easier with my hand pruners, as is opening up a bag of soil, since soil knives are rarely very sharp.

I understand the appeal of carrying one tool to do many jobs, but in my opinion, those jobs need to be done very well or else I’ve gained nothing for the convenience of having one less tool handy.

There is one thing a hori hori does so well that no other tool can match, and that’s in the intimidation department. Carrying around a big knife will certainly deter any ne’er-do-wells, but gardeners who, like me, dabbled in hori hori fantacism, know the secret: That knife is way too dull to do any damage. Plus, we’re carrying around three other tools that we can defend ourselves with that will probably do the job better.