How To Use a Scuffle Hoe to Weed the Vegetable Garden - and Why I Love Mine So Much

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My Thai pink egg tomato patch before. . .

And about 3 minutes after.

Years ago, I read a magazine article in which several well known gardeners named their favorite gardening tool. Someone, I forget who it was, said theirs was the scuffle hoe, which is sometimes called a stirrup hoe.

They went on to describe how it did a superb job of weeding with hardly any effort; you simply pushed and pulled the hoe just under the soil surface and voila! all your pesky weeds were severed at the base, while your surrounding plants and their roots went undisturbed.

I immediately longed for one. The ones I found for sale were pricey. I smacked the longing into submission and convinced myself that my life was totally complete despite its lack of a scuffle hoe.

Fast forward a few years to my first spring, complete with giant garden, in Missouri. I'm wandering around a small hardware store that's having a going out of business sale, and I spy a couple of scuffle hoes. They're simply made, don't even have a brand name, but are under five dollars each. Sold!

I take one home, attack a small patch of weeds with the oh-so-easy, push-pull motion, and watch in disbelief as my new wonder tool fails to do absolutely anything. I can practically hear the weeds and the salesperson laughing at me.

Fast forward several more years. For some reason I can no longer recall, I decide to dust off my scuffle hoe and give it another chance. That famous gardener had raved about it. If he was stranded on a desert island, all he wanted was that stupid, useless hoe.

And then I figured out why.

More below. . .

The secret of the scuffle hoe is knowing that this is one of those 'specialty' tools that does one—and only one—very specific job. And it does it extremely well. In this case, it eliminates itty bitty weeds that have just emerged from soft, workable, non-compacted soil. My problem the first time around was that I was under the impression it would take down weeds that were already off to a good start. Not a chance.

At this point you're probably starting to think that you don't need a scuffle hoe. Maybe it's beginning to remind you of those baby tillers you see advertised on television that, when you think about it, really do nothing more than fluff up soil that has already been weeded, tilled, and fluffed up. But you're wrong—about the scuffle hoe, not the baby tiller.

Those tiny, innocuous weeds that are oh so easy to ignore will turn into deep-rooted, rampaging monsters faster than you can say "Damn, I forgot to mulch." I've seen one little morning glory sprout practically take over an entire garden in a couple of days.

Dealing with these baby weeds before they get a stronghold is the key, but picking them out by hand can be mind-numbing, jaw-clenching work, and using a regular hoe may damage your surrounding plants. This is where the scuffle hoe flies in and saves the day.

While doing a little online research for this post, I discovered that there are actually two different implements known as scuffle hoes. There's the kind I have that's shown in the photo above, and there's another type that consists of a triangular-shaped solid piece of metal. Apparently they work in similar ways, although they look completely different.

I've never tried the triangular type, but after coming across the Rogue Scuffle Hoe, which is handcrafted in the USA from recycled agricultural disk blades and "cuts pushing or pulling and will be a tool you reach for often," the longing for another new tool has returned. I also have my eye on a couple of other Rogue specialty hoes. And to think that just a few quick clicks ago I thought my life was complete.

If you have any experience with this other type of scuffle hoe, I would love to hear about it—especially if it will convince me I don't need one.

There's only one other thing you keep in mind when bringing a scuffle hoe into your garden, and that is that if you don't bother to mulch your now weed-free soil, those little weeds will come right back.

Thai pink egg tomatoes mulched with grass clippings

Two weeks later and not a weed in sight.

And if you don't keep scuffling them away, you'll end up with this:

And then you'll be forced to bring in something with a little more power.

Like a Weed Eater.

But if you have a Wandering Weed Eater, you will then have to literally take matters into your own hands, and yank out all those weeds yourself.

If your soil is nice and loose and fertile, this isn't as bad of a job as it appears to be. I weeded this bed in about 20 minutes, maybe less. On the bright side, finishing such a visible task like this feels extremely rewarding, plus I now have lots of compost material.

On the other hand, a little scuffle would have have been a whole lot easier.

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