Weeding with the hori hori knife

It’s June and the Genus garden is really beginning to bloom. The downside of all the seasonal growth is the constant battle with weeds. It’s one of the most important jobs for gardeners during spring and early summer. Getting on top of the weeds during this part of the season ensures flowers and veg get off to a good start and perform their best.

Our cottage garden style of planting means that hand weeding is essential, as Monty Don says, by “getting up close and personal” to those wild plants we don’t want in the borders and veg plots. There are many methods of hand weeding, we know that some gardeners prefer to kneel and others to bend, and there are a range of tools to aid weeding tasks.

Weeding was actually one of the gardening tasks that inspired the design of the Genus gardening trousers: integral waterproof kneepads to provide support and comfort whilst down on the ground, and a high cut waist to protect kidneys from the elements whilst bending. As for tools, we have already blogged about the fantastic hori hori knife that one of our American customers introduced to us, and once again we feel we have to extol the virtues of this great gardening tool. We have been using the hori hori during dry spells to hoe around plants, and after rain, to slide down alongside the roots of dandelions and thistles and loosen them low down in the soil. It's also perfectly shaped to get in between the gaps between paving slabs to slice through those annoying little tufts of grass and mini dandelions.

We love this knife so much that we even designed a special pocket on our gardening trousers that fits the hori hori perfectly.

With our gardening clothes and the hori hori making the task of weeding a little more comfortable, we are encouraged to get out there and weed little and often, which really keeps us on top of weed control. We might say that weeding becomes almost a therapeutic experience!