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I love gardening. I hate weeding. Thankfully, I have a fix for my garden grief: a stirrup hoe.
I started gardening just about three years ago. Before then, I was a garden mooch. I selfishly enjoyed lazy summer evenings on my parents’ back porch, surrounded by stunning native perennial garden beds lovingly established by my mother. The vibrant colors, alluring fragrance, and charming hustle and bustle of wildlife offered a much-needed reprieve from my otherwise technology-fueled existence. But the thought of exerting such effort to plant a garden of my own? Hard pass.
Then the pandemic happened. I was miserable. The world was often miserable. I needed something to pull me out of my funk. So in May 2020, I officially became a gardener.
My mother arrived enthusiastically at my doorstep with transplants from her own garden: a delightful array of North American native plants including Golden Alexander (Zizia aurea), Bee Balm (Monarda spp.), Anise Hyssop (Agastache foeniculum), and Canada Anemone (Anemone canadensis). For the next few years, I converted much of the charred hellscape that was my 0.27-acre turf lot into a biodiverse, pollinator-friendly paradise designed to shelter and feed butterflies, bees, and birds native to my region of the United States.
My garden was beautiful. And, thanks in no small part to some much-needed antidepressants (really), life started to feel beautiful, too. But then came the weeds.
I never realized how much work is involved in the ongoing maintenance of a garden. Everywhere I look, a project looms. Chief among them: weeding.
Dealing with weeds is not fun. It’s one of those near-daily gardening tasks that feels endless. Every time I turn around, something is growing where it shouldn’t be. A deceptively beautiful Hedge Bindweed attempts to strangle the life out of my delicate purple Coneflower seedlings. English ivy silently creeps over from neighboring properties. Leggy crabgrass quickly forms aggressive colonies in my annual beds. And even welcome plants in my garden, like Black-Eyed Susan and Blue Wood Aster, self-sow readily each season.
Somehow, some way, I must evict these unwanted invaders.
In 2021, I sought out a tool to make the process of weeding more efficient (an endeavor that in concept would likely make my old-school mother roll her eyes). While I’ve used hand weeders and cultivators in the past, both of these options still required quite a bit more work than I was looking to put in. They also didn’t allow me to clear large annual garden beds of weeds quickly.
But the stirrup hoe (which is sold under a variety of names, including scuffle hoe, action hoe, loop hoe, and hula hoe) is different. Bearing an uncanny resemblance to, well, a stirrup, its design and functionality are very clever. The Craftsman Action Hoe, which I now use on an almost-daily basis in the garden, has a durable yet lightweight 54-inch hardwood handle attached to a flat, steel blade-head that slightly oscillates back and forth; a simple push and pull action severs weed roots with minimal soil disturbance. Its trapezoidal shape allows for easy maneuvering between plants for highly effective weeding without disrupting or (god forbid) injuring my precious garden.
The stirrup hoe is so much better than the hand weeders and cultivators I’ve used in the past because I can weed from a standing position that reduces the strain on my body. The tool can be leveraged for a variety of soil conditions, from my own dense clay soil to the more lightweight soil in my raised vegetable garden beds. And the ease of use allows me to weed an immense amount of surface area containing small-to-medium-sized weeds at one time (large weeds require hand weeding or a different tool altogether). Once I used the stirrup hoe for a variety of weed-related needs, I realized the once-tedious task could actually be… fun? And even better, I could weed significantly faster than with previous methods I’ve tried.
Because I work at Wirecutter, I couldn’t just let my own anecdotal evidence speak for itself. I felt compelled to put together my own (vaguely scientific) experiment to prove this new method is far superior to what I've tried in the past.
I recently planted a new Monarch Waystation, a 10-by-20-feet garden consisting of a variety of early-to-late-season blooming flowers meant to support Monarch butterflies through various stages of their life cycle, from birth to their late-summer migration south. After biblical levels of rain this spring, weeds were close to conquering my new garden bed. So I orchestrated a test to compare the speed of weeding with the stirrup hoe against pulling the weeds manually. The garden bed was split in two equal parts: one half to be weeded by the hoe and the other by hand. I set a timer and got to weeding. I aimed for roughly 90% to 95% weed removal from each side.
I was able to weed the garden bed with the stirrup hoe in half the time of pulling weeds by hand.
But the stirrup hoe wasn’t just faster! It also made me less tired and more confident in the destruction of the weeds. My native soil is very compact and tough to dig into by hand, so weeding left my fingers crampy and fatigued as I tried to dig deeply into the soil to extract the roots. This likely could have been solved by using a hand weeder tool, but I don’t believe it would have saved me any time since I would have still needed to manually remove each weed individually.
It's also far more ergonomic; 15 minutes of hand weeding left my knees, hands, and back throbbing (yes, I could be in better shape). But with my beloved stirrup hoe, I was able to weed my garden without crouching down at all—weeding with the stirrup hoe and using a rake to collect the debris. The stirrup hoe would be ideal for gardeners with limited mobility.
The stirrup hoe has made my life substantially better. It makes weeding suck less. And finally, I can enjoy my beautiful garden in peace, free from the weeds that bound me… at least until they come back again.
This article was edited by Ben Frumin.
Mowing Blades Rough Cut Wirecutter is the product recommendation service from The New York Times. Our journalists combine independent research with (occasionally) over-the-top testing so you can make quick and confident buying decisions. Whether it’s finding great products or discovering helpful advice, we’ll help you get it right (the first time).