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Decolonize Your Diet with This Indigenous Cook’s New Book

Calvosa Olson grew up with a Karuk mother and an Italian father on a homestead in the Hoopa Valley Reservation, near California’s northern edge. She spent a great deal of time during those formative years outside, learning about her plant and animal relatives and eating a combination of commodity foods and the foods her parents grew, gathered, hunted, and bartered for. “Family celebrations and special foods were formative to the way I now show love and connect to my identity as a flourishing matriarch,” she writes in the introduction to Chími Nu’am.

“We are all colonized, our palates are colonized. And it’s kind of impossible to raise children who don’t love Fruit Snacks and other processed foods.”

Although Calvosa Olson moved to the Bay Area, she stayed in touch with the Karuk community and continued to nurture the food traditions with which she was raised. She writes:

“When I had children of my own, I wanted to connect my sons to these family recipes and to being Karuk, as we were living away from Karuk community and traditional lands. By intentionally establishing this connection, I discovered a love for developing new and colorful recipes based on our old family recipes and traditions. Gathering wild foods, sharing, teaching, cooking, and tending have all been an opportunity to grow and heal in the nurturing way I didn’t know I needed.”

Chími Nu’am, which translates to “Let’s eat!” in the Karuk language, is in many ways a record of that process in addition to a compendium of recipes. Organized by season, the book guides its readers in gathering, processing, and cooking with Indigenous foods in hopes of helping us begin to integrate more traditional ingredients into our oversimplified modern palates.

Its recipes range from creative takes on familiar foods—blackberry-braised smoked salmon and elk chili beans—to dishes that will be entirely new to many readers, such as nettle tortillas, miner’s lettuce salad, and spruce-tip syrup. And it includes recipes for nearly a dozen foods made with acorns, including crackers, muffins, crepes, and hand pies, as well as a rustic acorn bread that calls for one cup of acorn flour and two cups of wheat flour.

Calvosa Olson has written a book that will speak to multiple audiences. But whether she’s guiding Indigenous readers to embrace more of their cultural foods or making recommendations for non-Indigenous readers interested in decolonizing their diets in an ethical way (hint: it’s about reciprocity), her voice and philosophy come through clearly on the page.

Civil Eats spoke to Calvosa Olson recently about the book, how she hopes it will reach those very different audiences, and her urgent call to all of us to begin reconnecting to the natural world through food.

How did the recipes in the book take shape, and how did you decide what to include and what to leave out to protect or preserve specific cultural foods and traditions?

I think we can all agree that Native people have lost so much, and so much has been taken, appropriated, and diluted. There are still some cultural foodways that are very similar to the foodways that we have always eaten. And because there are so few, I didn’t feel like it would be appropriate to put those in a book for everybody. Even in the work that I do for my own family, there’s a difference between what is for us in ceremony and what is for us to incorporate in our everyday lives or to maintain our connection to our stewardship.

We are all colonized, our palates are colonized. And it’s kind of impossible to raise children who don’t love Fruit Snacks and other processed foods. But I really wanted them to develop a love for foods that are bitter or fishy—those types of things that we shy away from in Western culture.

“We are all suffering from diet-related diseases. It’s terrible. And it’s so difficult to right that ship for many reasons.”

Different audiences will experience this book differently, but as a non-Indigenous reader, I felt invited in—invited to take part and understand more of the cultural experience behind these foods rather than merely follow recipes. That said, gathering and preparing these ingredients is also going to be a learning curve for some readers.

We all need to develop relationships with our foodways, and our lifeways, and what’s going on around us. Nobody can turn on the news and disagree with that. We need to at least develop some relationships with the rhythms of the world around us right now. So, I want the book to be a warm welcome in to do that.

But also, how you do that is very important. And I love that people are asking: How do I do it ethically? You have this opportunity to go forward intentionally and choose the lens that you want to view this work through, and you can center Indigenous people, and our traditional knowledge and our relationship-building and community-centered lifeways, as you go forward. Which means that you are also building relationship and building community with Indigenous people and we’re all working together.

And how do you interact with Native people who have been deliberately othered in the state, and deliberately made invisible? Growing up in the U.S., we don’t hear from Indigenous people, and that’s what causes a lot of the mystic Indian tropes. And you can see that in the [U.S.] education system, which ignores Native people, and refers to us in the past. But we are still here, and we are safeguarding so much of the world’s biodiversity.

We’re also at the forefront of environmental science; we have incredibly sophisticated people working in our environmental departments. We have climate action plans, we have stewardship plans, we have everything we could possibly need to go forward to rehabilitate the land except power and influence. Even if I only reach one person at a time, and they went about things in a different way and began to understand the value of [traditional ecological knowledge and Indigenous foodways] in a new way, that would be a success.

You recommend that non-Native folks contact their local tribal representatives when they want to learn how to gather acorns and other Indigenous ingredients. What do you say to people who worry that they’d be bothering them in asking for their services?

There are non-Native people out there who run foraging classes and you have the choice to either pay them or you can call or email tribal peoples or tribal entities and say, “Listen, I’m interested in learning more about this. And I can pay non-Native foragers, but I would prefer to put my resources with you. I want to center your knowledge. Do you offer any classes to the public for gathering or know of anybody willing to show us how to gather?”

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Author: Twilight Greenaway

Tragic farm shootout in Iowa results in father-son fatality | AGDAILY

AG Daily

Authorities in Northwest Iowa reported that a father and son have died following a series of incidents on their farm near Hornick.

At about 7:30 p.m. Sunday, the Woodbury County Sheriff’s office was contacted by 72-year-old Todd Sulsberger asking for help.

“The Woodbury County Communications Center received a 911 call from a male victim, reporting his son was shooting at him,” Sheriff Chad Sheehan said during a briefing.

Upon arriving at the scene, authorities reported that Sulsberger’s son, 44-year-old Walter Sulsberger, was sitting in his father’s truck on the farm.

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“At 9:10 p.m., I made contact with the suspect via phone, and he told me there would be no peaceful resolution and made threats toward law enforcement officers,” the sheriff said.

The sheriff requested backup from the Sioux City Police Department, Iowa State Patrol, and the Tri-county CERT Team. Three armored vehicles and tactical personnel were sent to the scene while the Iowa State Patrol provided air surveillance.

According to reports, the crisis negotiator was on the phone for hours with Walter Sulsberger for hours.

“At approximately 2:45 a.m., while the crisis negotiator was attempting to negotiate a peaceful surrender, the homicide suspect fired multiple shots at tactical teams who were attempting to move in to take the suspect into custody,” Sheehan said. “Being met with gunfire and in fear for their lives and with no other option, law enforcement personnel returned fire, striking the suspect.”

Two of the armored vehicles were struck by gunfire, but no law enforcement personnel were injured. Medical personnel pronounced Walter Sulsberger dead at the scene. The body of Sulsberger’s father was found a short time later.

Before Todd Sulsberger called law enforcement, Sheehan confirmed that dispatchers also received a call that livestock were running loose at the same residence, and that a fire was set to large hay bales on the property.

State agents with the Iowa Division of Criminal Investigation have been called in to investigate the shootings.

Tragic farm shootout in Iowa results in father-son fatality | AGDAILY

AG Daily

Authorities in Northwest Iowa reported that a father and son have died following a series of incidents on their farm near Hornick.

At about 7:30 p.m. Sunday, the Woodbury County Sheriff’s office was contacted by 72-year-old Todd Sulsberger asking for help.

“The Woodbury County Communications Center received a 911 call from a male victim, reporting his son was shooting at him,” Sheriff Chad Sheehan said during a briefing.

Upon arriving at the scene, authorities reported that Sulsberger’s son, 44-year-old Walter Sulsberger, was sitting in his father’s truck on the farm.

[embedded content]

“At 9:10 p.m., I made contact with the suspect via phone, and he told me there would be no peaceful resolution and made threats toward law enforcement officers,” the sheriff said.

According to reports, the crisis negotiator was on the phone for hours with Walter Sulsberger for hours.

State agents with the Iowa Division of Criminal Investigation have been called in to investigate the shootings.

Meet the Viticulturist Testing Thousands of Seeds to Find the Strongest One

Food & Drink, Food & Lifestyle, Food Security, Modern Farmer, Wine

Mireia Pujol-Busquets spent her childhood surrounded by grapes. Her father, Josep Maria, founded the family’s winery, Alta Alella, in 1991. The current 50-hectare farm, in Barcelona’s Serralada de Marina Natural Park, focused on certified organic farming techniques, creating organic wines ranging from orange and pet-nat to traditional cava. Her mother, Cristina, was the owner of Cristina Guillén Selecció de Vins, a wine shop, also in Barcelona. She, however, took a different route and after a lifetime surrounded by all things wine, went to Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona (UAB) to study biology.

Mireia Pujol-Busquets. Photography courtesy of Alta Alella.

After graduating, Pujol-Busquets worked for the United Nations in Thailand, focusing on environmental and agricultural issues. It was through that experience that she realized she was happiest not in an office but actively doing field work and getting her hands dirty. Her travels next took her to Switzerland in 2010, where she studied hybrid plants at an organic research center. There, she realized she had to enact real change as the wine industry was facing disease, climate change and new forms of parasites.

“[The Swiss research center had a] small winery and, in this small winery, they work with hybrids, different kinds,” she says. “I had the opportunity to see how, thanks to these varieties, they can work organically—and [work] well,” she says.

She returned to Spain and enrolled in a Masters program in organic agriculture, followed by a Master’s in viticulture, while working at her family’s winery on the weekends. Pujol-Busquets began thinking about the wine world long-term; of the generations prior to herself and the generations after that will continue winemaking. And that’s when she realized she would have to change the world, starting with her own two hands.

“I needed to find grapes that could live in the [new, warmer] conditions. So, we got in contact with researchers that have experience in hybrids and two more wineries and then we started this project,” she says.

Photography courtesy of Alta Alella.

The project to which she’s referring, Resistant and Autochthonous Varieties Adapted to Climate Change, was launched 12 years ago and is ongoing, developing varieties that are resistant to plagues such as powdery mildew and downy mildew and have more drought tolerance. She was specifically looking to create plants that would be increasingly adapted to climate change without having to treat the soil or the vines. To do this, Pujol-Busquets and her team of about 10 people (who also multitask in the vineyards, she says) planted more than 5,000 seeds in greenhouses in Thailand, where the high humidity would mimic extreme conditions. The hybrids in this study incorporated a variety of grapes, including Xarel-lo, Macabeu and Parellada. From there, it was, quite literally, survival of the fittest.

“We did about 300,000 different crossings of these varieties. The ones that were the most resistant ones we planted on the field,” she says. ”It was the resistance to disease and temperature changes that were valued.” Pujol-Busquets then started making small batches of wine from these hybrids to see how they behaved in terms of acidity and alcohol. Then, there was a final test to see if the plants organoleptically talk—meaning, they would have the same taste, color, odor and feel of the plants from which they were derived.

“They have to look really, really alike or very similar to the mother plant. We had to find the sons and the daughters of these plants; they are stronger, but they have the characteristics of the parent plant,” she says. While the study has obtained 400 plants during this process, Pujol-Busquets notes that the goal is to end up with the 12 strongest that most resemble the origin plant.

Now, the next challenge is legalizing these grapes and having them be accepted as a new biodiversity, she says. However, this is an uphill battle. Pujol-Busquets notes that part of the issue is local tradition in Spain, namely the Catalonia region, and keeping the same vines.

Pujol-Busquets sees this type of study as replicating what would have naturally occurred were humans not on the planet—if vines had been left alone to grow, change and adapt on their own. Pujol-Busquets explains that as organic agriculture and trying to find ways to create the best product with minimal—if any—intervention is crucial to both the maintenance and growth of the wine industry.

If anything, she is hoping this study will inspire others—PhD students, viticulturists, winemakers and even local administrations—to look at sustainable farming in the wine industry with new, fresh eyes and take the subsequent generations into account when making today’s decisions. “We have to evolve,” she insists. “We have to do what we can do and we have to try new things, new techniques.”

Photography courtesy of Alta Alella.

While Pujol-Busquets works to do her part to make a difference, especially in Spain, there are other growers and researchers around the world who are also fighting the good fight across the wine industry. In Sonoma, CA, Chalk Hill has worked with a clonal study of Chardonnay since 1996, finally registering Clone 97 in 2003. The brand worked alongside University of California, Davis to make these inroads. In Tuscany, Italy, Banfi is also making an attempt to fight climate change through viticulture, says general manager Enrico Viglierchio. “We have been able to tailor our approach to viticultural activity based on how specific varieties are impacted by the changing patterns in temperature and water,” he says in an email, noting that the team is working with the University of Milan on experimental rootstock that is able to perform under significant hydric stress conditions.

Pujol-Busquets explains that it would have been easier to pull plants from other parts of the world to Spain. There are plants that winemakers already know are more resistant and stronger than clones. However, in Catalonia, there is a heritage to uphold that is important to the wine world. And, that heritage is something that Pujol-Busquets wanted to ensure would not be lost for future generations. “There is tradition. There is culture. And it took a long time to build that culture, a long time to build that foundation. So, let’s try to be smart and not lose it.”

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Author: Emily Cappiello

California’s Salmon Are Teetering on the Brink

California, climate, Fish, Food & Lifestyle, Modern Farmer

Arron Hockaday Sr. remembers fishing for salmon with his father in the late 1970s. Back then, it wasn’t just the number of salmon running up Northern California’s Klamath River that impressed him. It was the size.

“Back then, gosh, it was amazing to see the fish when the fish ran during the fall,” says Hockaday, a traditional fisherman and council member of the Karuk Tribe. “The salmon were huge.” On average, he says, you could catch fish ranging from 40 to 50 pounds—although members of his grandparents’ generation were known to catch 100-pound Chinook salmon at Ishi Pishi Falls, the tribe’s sacred fishing grounds. “Nowadays, our average is anywhere from 15 to maybe 25 pounds. We catch a 30-pounder and that’s a hog, that’s a big fish.”

A slow-motion disaster for tribes, commercial fishermen and conservationists, the decline of California’s once-abundant salmon population has been unfolding for decades. The crisis has its roots in decisions about the state’s water use made a century ago and, like so many stories of water wars in the West, it has pitted stakeholders against one another in a seemingly zero-sum contest over a dwindling natural resource.

The outlook is grim, but there are bright spots. As a future of increasingly hot and dry weather hangs over the state, can change come quickly enough to save the imperiled salmon from extinction?

Salmon are the epitome of endurance and resilience. Spawned in cold, high-elevation mountain streams, they navigate downriver as juveniles, fattening up as they make their way to coastal estuaries, where they undergo a remarkable transformation from freshwater to saltwater fish before entering the ocean. Depending on the species, they can spend years maturing at sea, where commercial fishermen vie for the valuable catch. Then, governed by an unshakeable biological imperative, they reverse the journey, this time propelling themselves against the current to return to their spawning grounds, where they’ll lay their eggs and then die, their nutrients enriching the river ecosystem.

Or, at least, that’s what salmon have historically done. But ever since white settlers made their way westward, a barrage of man-made challenges has disrupted the salmon’s natural journey. In the late 1840s came the gold miners, whose use of hydraulic mining clogged waterways with sediment. Then, a growing population began to reshape the state’s water systems, building channels and levees to control where water flowed. In the 20th century, ambitious dam projects rose up to store and divert water for cities and farming, cutting salmon off from hundreds of miles of upriver habitat.

“In a way, it’s amazing we have as many salmon around as we do,” says Peter Moyle, associate director of the Center for Watershed Sciences at the University of California, Davis and a distinguished professor emeritus in the university’s Department of Wildlife, Fish and Conservation Biology. He estimates that, prior to the Gold Rush, there were one million to two million salmon a year coming up through the Central Valley alone, and another half a million or more in other rivers. But a confluence of factors, including water diversions that erased more than 90 percent of the state’s wetlands and large dams that blocked 70 percent of salmon’s historic spawning grounds, have decimated the wild salmon population.

A mature Chinook salmon. (Photo: Ryan Hagerty/USFWS)

Today, the state’s salmon fishery is reliant on hatcheries that produce millions of fish and release them into the wild. “What we see today, the reason we have as much salmon as we do today, is hatcheries. But the hatchery fish are in decline,” says Moyle. “They keep producing more hatchery fish, and the numbers keep going down, partly because hatchery fish are poorly adapted for life in the wild.”

Warming waters present another threat, and one that increases in severity during drought, when surface water supplies falter. Warm freshwater can contribute to the proliferation of algal blooms and harmful bacteria, and temperatures above 70 degrees Fahrenheit can be lethal to salmon; ocean acidification and marine heatwaves also imperil the fish. That’s bad news for California, where, despite a winter of heavy rainfalls that refilled reservoirs and lifted the state out of a severe multi-year drought, human-caused climate change continues to accelerate the frequency and severity of extreme heat events and drought conditions.

And those recurrent drought conditions have forced salmon, and the people who rely on them, closer to a breaking point.

This spring, for just the second time in history, the ocean commercial and recreational salmon fishing season was canceled, impacting a swath of the West Coast, from northern Oregon to the border with Mexico. The decision came after last year’s Sacramento River fall-run Chinook, the principal salmon stock harvested in California’s fisheries, returned to the Central Valley at near-record low numbers—estimated at just 169,767 adults.

“Those numbers were abysmal,” says Glen Spain, executive director of the Pacific Coast Federation of Fishermen’s Associations. “What happens three years ago determines how many adults come back this year, so what we’re seeing was the worst part of the [2020] drought, which essentially dried up the rivers or created hot water conditions, and that just killed lots of eggs and lots of young salmon before they could even get to the ocean.”

Without the salmon season, many fishermen are losing their livelihoods. “There are over 1,000 boats out there with permits, and they’re basically in dry dock,” he says, noting that the closure could extend beyond this season, and up to another two years, creating uncertainty in an already challenging industry.

“It used to be that we could rely on a salmon season to buffer us from potentially a slow crab season,” says Dick Ogg, a commercial fisherman who operates out of Bodega Bay. “But with the seasons being compressed and getting smaller and smaller, and opportunities becoming less and less … the impact is significant.”

Fishing boats in Bodega Bay, CA. (Photo: Shutterstock)

In addition to salmon, Ogg holds permits to fish for black cod, albacore, Dungeness crab and rockfish. The days when a fisherman could rely on just the salmon fishery are “almost a thing of the past,” he says, but the cost of diversifying with multiple permits can become a barrier, especially for new fishermen entering the business. “The cost of each permit, the cost of owning your own vessel, the insurance that’s required, the slip fees that you have to pay, the taxes that you have to take care of, the crew that you need to maintain … it just is devastating.”

In April, California Governor Gavin Newsom submitted a request to the US Secretary of Commerce asking for a Federal Fishery Disaster Declaration, which would provide relief for businesses and fishermen impacted by the closure of the salmon season. In the meantime, Spain says, “There is the edge of desperation in a lot of our communities.”

“We all know why this is happening … but what we don’t know is how to get around it, at a family-by-family and port-by-port level,” says Spain. “And the sad thing is this was once a billion-dollar fishery.”

The formidable challenges facing California’s salmon population are prompting efforts to get creative with everything from building a controversial “fishway” around the Yuba River’s Daguerre Point Dam to exploring the reintroduction of fish transplanted to New Zealand more than a century ago, as the Winnemem Wintu Tribe has proposed.

In the Central Valley, one project has a particularly grand vision for transforming water management systems to support native fish. Called the Nigiri Project for its fish-on-rice concept, it’s a collaboration between researchers and farmers that floods rice fields in the winter, helping to break down rice straw while offering juvenile salmon and waterfowl conditions that mimic the bug-rich floodplain ecosystems to which they’re adapted.

It’s a win-win that researcher Jacob Katz hopes proves that a paradigm shift is possible. “We actually have the capacity to manage the Sacramento Valley in a way that is good for both fish and for farms,” says Katz, a senior scientist at California Trout, a nonprofit aimed at restoring waterways and wild fish. “One of the major reasons we’ve so diminished our fisheries resources is not necessarily an inevitable consequence of development but a specific and direct consequence of the way in which we developed.”

Juvenile Chinook salmon. (Photo: USFWS/Flickr)

Levees that block rivers from adjoining wetlands have benefits, such as flood protection and creating farmland, but they also cut fish off from essential food sources in floodplain wetlands, turning rivers into food deserts. The Nigiri Project, along with a related initiative that drains food-rich fields back into rivers, provides a blueprint for what Katz hopes could be a large-scale reimagining of the system. It’s ambitious, but Katz says that, “if you look at the science, we have no right to expect a population-level recovery of salmon if we aren’t actually changing the real world at landscape scale. To have a postage stamp here and a postage stamp there, why would we expect that to lead to population recovery? That’s not how it works.”

But rethinking the levee model to provide food for salmon would address just one of the two biggest problems facing the fish, says Katz. The other is the large-scale dam infrastructure that blocks salmon’s upstream migration. “The fact that we have essentially dammed all of the [Sacramento] Valley’s rivers, cutting off that critical cold water refuge, is ultimately a death sentence, an extinction sentence, for our salmon if something isn’t done.”

While most dams are built for a 50-year lifespan, the average age of California’s nearly 1,500 dams is 70 years old, according to the American Society of Civil Engineers, which gave the state’s dams a grade of C- in its most recent infrastructure report card. But that wasn’t what prompted the Klamath River tribal communities to launch a campaign to remove the four aging dams sitting upriver from them.

In 2002, upwards of 70,000 Chinook salmon died as part of a massive fish kill caused by low flows on the Klamath, the result of low flows caused by water diversions by farmers and ranchers upstream. “Tens of thousands of adult salmon died before spawning and just littered the banks of the river,” says Craig Tucker, a natural resource policy consultant for the Karuk Tribe. “And for tribal communities, that was sort of the breaking point.”

What followed was a grassroots effort by tribes and other advocacy groups to remove the dams, as well as to broker a water-sharing deal between the tribes and Klamath Basin irrigators that required an act of Congress to pass. Ultimately, the arduous, multi-decade campaign was successful: Demolition recently began on the first dam, and the remaining dams are set to come out by the end of 2024 in what’s been billed as the largest dam removal project in history.

Klamath Basin tribes and allies staging a dam-removal rally in 2006. (Photo: Patrick McCully/Flickr)

“These should be easy,” says Tucker of the tortured process. “The Klamath River dams are what we call ‘deadbeat dams.’ They don’t pay their own way, there’s no flood control, no irrigation diversions, they’re not making a lot of money for anybody. They have this devastating impact on fisheries and water quality. It should be a no-brainer. And it’s taken us 20 years to get to dam removal.”

As most of the state’s dams are approaching or past their engineered life spans, Tucker says we’ve reached a critical inflection point for the future of salmon. “Now is that moment of reckoning: Are we going to have wild salmon or not? If we’re going to have wild salmon, we have to remove some dams.”

The situation reflects the complexity of a system that aims to control and deliver a limited resource—water—that just happens to also be the foundation of life on earth. For farmers, water is necessary for growing crops. For fishermen, it’s essential for supporting fish. And for the Karuk and other tribes, those fish form the basis of their entire cultural identity. “It’s not just a fish, it’s a way of life,” says Kenneth Brink, another Karuk council member and traditional fisherman. “It’s our ceremonies. It’s our cross on top of our church. Some people just look at fish as a food. Some people look at it as money. We look at it as a way of life.”

It remains to be seen whether that way of life—and the fish on which it relies—can continue. But for the people who are fighting for salmon’s survival, the only option is to carry on.

This story is part of ‘State of Abundance,’ a five-part series about California agriculture and climate change. Visit Modern Farmer every day this week (July 10-14) for more.

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Author: Rose Garrett

Tools to make gardening easier

AG Week

Well, it finally happened. I’ve turned into a combination of my father and mother, complete with joints that don’t work quite like they did when I was 18.

I remember Mom struggling to get back up after kneeling in the garden to pull weeds. Dad’s knees were fine, but his back got sore stooping to pick string beans.

When we’re young, it doesn’t seem like it’ll ever happen to us, and it’s easy to take for granted the simple ability to get up off the ground from a kneeling position without grabbing onto something for support.

Garden tools to the rescue! I just bought a garden kneeling bench that makes it a cinch to kneel down, pluck a weed, and boost myself back up, quicker than you can say “I should have taken a Tylenol.”

Gardeners love our tools and gadgets. The following is my own must-have list.

Tools for planting

A rototiller, large or small, isn’t a necessity, but can help prepare garden or flowerbed soil. A spading fork works well in small areas or raised beds.
A long-handled hoe for making and covering furrows in the vegetable garden, or for planting tomatoes and other transplants. A planting-type hoe is different from a weeding hoe, which I’ll mention in the next section.
String, twine and wood stakes are used for making straight rows in the vegetable garden.
A hand-held trowel is handy for transplanting individual plants.
For planting trees and shrubs, a spade made of high-quality steel can be sharpened, making digging easier.

Tools for weeding

A long handled, high-quality hoe is invaluable and the best type for weeding often surprises people. Instead of the large-bladed, blocky type that’s used for planting, the best weeding hoes have very narrow blades that glide through the soil surface. A top-quality hoe is expensive, but has a steel blade that can be sharpened to a fine edge, making hoeing easier and more effective.
Short handled weeding tools are needed for precision weeding close to plants or vegetable rows. Japanese tools are classics, including the Hori Hori knife and weeding sickle. If made of high-quality steel, they can be sharpened for easy gliding through the soil.
If no other precision tool is available, I use a table knife, which allows precision weeding.
An old long-bladed butcher knife works well for deep-cutting dandelions and other weeds from perennial beds and landscapes. Dandelion diggers, both long and short-handled, can be purchased, but a butcher knife sometimes cuts the root deeper.
A wheel hoe type of cultivator is useful between rows of vegetables if the garden is medium-to-large.
A four-tined, long handled cultivator can break the crust of the soil following rain, preventing soil cracking, conserving moisture, and eliminating weeds.

061023.F.FF.GrowingTogether — A quality, well sharpened hoe will glide through soil.

Fan-type leaf rakes, if the tines are sturdy, remove excess thatch from spring lawns.
Garden rakes have short, heavy metal tines for leveling soil or preparing seed beds.

Pump sprayers, either one-or-two-gallon are useful for applying insecticides, fungicides and herbicides in yard and garden. I keep one sprayer for insecticides and fungicides and a separate sprayer just for herbicides.
Hose-end sprayers are a handy way to apply products to larger areas. The product is added to the spray jar, and the dial is set to the labeled dosage.

Tools for pruning

Handheld pruning shears are a multi-purpose tool for cutting back perennials, deadheading blossoms, and pruning branches about pencil-size in diameter or just slightly larger.
Long-handled pruning loppers efficiently cut branches around an inch in diameter. The long handles help reach into rose bushes while pruning, and also make easy work of cutting back shrubs when rejuvenating.
A pruning saw is needed for branches larger than about one and a half inches.
Pole pruners are especially useful in pruning the upper branches of apple trees.
Hedge shears, either manual or powered, are for shearing formal hedges, not generally for trimming individual shrubs, which can give them an unnatural, tight, ball-shape.

Tools to make gardening more comfortable

Kneeling pads are invaluable for working in rock mulch or other hard surfaces.
Kneeling benches not only cushion the knees, but provide support for getting up off the ground. Some even have compartments to hold tools.
Garden carts make easy work of hauling trays of plants around while planting.
A heavy-duty wheelbarrow can be used for everything from potting plants to hauling away weeds or excess soil.

By
Don Kinzler

Don Kinzler, a lifelong gardener, is the horticulturist with North Dakota State University Extension for Cass County. Readers can reach him at donald.kinzler@ndsu.edu.

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