One garden tool to rule them all

I have no idea how long I’ve had my hori hori knife. Well ok, I have some idea. My memory and the degree of disintegration on its cheap pleather sheath both suggest it dates back to my very first garden, which would be the early aughts in Napa CA. I have loved it since I first bought it — genuinely no idea where — and have held onto it throughout multiple interstate moves and many years when I wasn’t gardening. I hadn’t used it much in the three seasons I’ve been ramping up this current garden ... until I suddenly had three trays of landscape plugs to get into the ground. And after being almost surgically attached to it the past couple of weeks, I can’t imagine gardening without it. If you don’t have one, I want to encourage you to add this indispensable workhorse to your tool kit, so here are three of my favorite ways to use a hori hori knife in the garden—

• If I have a number of small plants to get into soil, whether veggie seedlings or whatever, the hori hori makes quick work of it. Just plunge the blade straight down into the dirt, give it a shove to open up a wedge-shaped hole, drop in the seedling and pull out the knife. (Just be careful not to slice your hand on the serrated edge in the process!) Then push the soil closed around the roots. I had been seriously dreading trying to plant so many plugs into the extremely rocky soil of my courtyard, which was until recently asphalt over chunky gravel. Digging a large hole for a redbud in this soil was one of the physically hardest things I’ve done in a long time, and gallon-size root balls for a few other things required my hand pick-axe. But for the plugs, this knife slid right in like it wasn’t even an issue.

• I frequently use a thick layer of cardboard and mulch to choke out turf grass and convert it into fresh planting space instead, but I don’t always have the time or patience to let the grass really die back under there before I start planting. The serrated edge of the hori hori makes it easy to slice a root ball-shaped hole through both the cardboard and the turf, so I can peel both of those layers away before proceeding to dig the appropriate hole for the plant. And of course, it’s also great for trimming roots, dead stems, small branches, etc.

• For wee weedlings, you can just pop the tip of the hori hori under them and give a little flick, and they’ll pop right out of the ground. For bigger, more entrenched weeds with deep roots that resist hand-pulling, the knife is the best way I know to fish one out.

As you can guess from the name, the hori hori knife originated in Japan as a gardening/farming multi-tool and it’s pretty perfect. I’d tell you what brand mine is if I knew, but it has no markings on it. I’ve never bought anything but inexpensive gardening tools (in fact, my favorite hand trowel is one I found literally rotting in that abandoned Napa garden and still use regularly, despite its decrepit wood handle) so it was not an investment piece, I can tell you that much. There are some popular and pricey ones out there, and given how useful it is maybe the cost is justifiable. But I’d say just buy one with a good strong handle, a sharp blade and a good sheath. I promise you’ll thank me for it.

For those of you who already depend on one, tell me how you use it the most—