Tiny Farm Gear

At double the price of the Troy-Bilt “Big Red” Horse, the top-of-the-line professional series BCS 948 walking tractor is quite the market garden machine. I haven’t tried or even seen one of these, but I’d love to. BCS is the biggest of the European 2-wheel tractor manufacturers. They have a full line, including a Horse equivalent. The walking tractor is an order above the North American big rototiller, they’re built as full-on agricultural equipment. The 948 is a true small-scale tractor, the difference found in the engineering, construction, and range of add-on implements. On this tiny farm, the Horse and the Kubota compact tractor cover the BCS from either side, to get an even wider range of smaller to larger jobs done, but the 948 could replace both for all of the most critical market gardening tasks, like tilling, cultivating and clean-up for several acres.

The Troy-Bilt Horse walking rototiller is a machine to swear by. I’ve had mine for four years and it’s gone through a lot. I bought a mid-1990s model, used, in mint condition. For a couple of seasons, it was the main tiller on two acres of market garden. I’d sometimes run it non-stop for an hour or more at a time, and for the better part of a day. No problems to date.

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This is the original Eliot Coleman broadfork design, made by Johnny’s Selected Seed in Maine (US). Johnny’s carries four in all, differing by the number of tines.

The ho-mi digger is an odd tool that I’ve had for three or four years and still haven’t gotten around to figuring out. It’s a traditional Korean farm and garden tool, around for 5,000 years, according to one source, so I guess it’s time-tested! It gets quite the write-up wherever I’ve read about it, which is why I bought it: weed, dig, make furrows for seed. Versatile! All-purpose! It may be the only garden tool you need. Just now I found this page of impressive testimonials. Well, guess I’ll be sure to really try it next season. It comes in long- and short-handled versions. I’ve seen it in a few catalogs, Lee Valley has one (where I got mine) that’s actually made in Korea!

The broadfork holds a lot of promise. You can break up soil without turning it, and, according to Eliot Coleman, you can prepare vast areas of garden in little time, with little effort (let gravity do the work). My broadfork is not the Coleman design (available at Johnny’s Seed), instead, the U-Bar Digger from Lee Valley. I tried to try it, but the ground has always been too hard to even get the tines in beyond a couple of inches. And this is in garden beds. I suspect the design. The tines, rather than being pointed, have a chisel edge (the ends of the rods are cut off at an angle, they don’t come to a point) and they don’t easily pierce clayey ground. And at 19 lbs, it’s quite a heavy hand tool to haul around. Maybe it works great on lighter soil, but the clay-loam we have here is where it would really make a difference. I’ll try again next spring.

The 10-tine Lee Valley Compost & Mulch Fork is a versatile tool that’s well-suited to a bunch of different tasks. It’s intended for shoveling compost and mulch, and works fine for that (although for moving around bulkier mulch, like straw, a much wider-tined hay or manure fork works better). I’ve used mine for five seasons, and find it shines at picking up smaller stuff, like stones and crop residue. For fallen tomatoes after the plants have been pulled, it’s perfect, lifting what you want while letting the soil sift through. It’s wide enough to get larger jobs done quickly, and very durable (I haven’t broken the handle or seriously bent tines yet, and it’s done some heavy shoveling). The tines are 1″ spacing. I guess it’s designed by Lee Valley (Canada/US). I just saw a 9-tine SHW Debris/Manure Fork that also looks good for similar tasks (SHW, in Germany, has apparently been making agricultural hand tools since 1267…).

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The Newer Spreader is a small manure spreader that can be drawn by a compact tractor or riding mower. These small spreaders seem to be aimed primarily at the horse farm market, where the volume of manure is lower than with, say, beef or dairy cattle. On the small farm, they look good for spreading smaller areas, particularly if you don’t use the big tractor gear required for the larger spreaders. They’re ground-driven, which means the spreading action is determined by the speed at which the wheels turn as they’re being pulled (larger spreaders are usually PTO-driven, connected directly to the engine, and the spreading action is not determined by tractor movement). I haven’t tried one yet, but this class of spreaders looks promising.

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