Hand-Forged Crevice Weeder

Hand forged one at a time by a gardener with a lifetime of experience and a knack for innovation and recognizing good design. The most difficult weeding job is extracting plants that take root in the narrow crevices between bricks or in sidewalk cracks. This tool has a thin, narrow, but strong blade that slips as deep as 3 inches into cracks. Its flat blade is left dull to drag weeds out by their roots and to avoid cutting them, which would allow them to regrow. Effective also for maintaining old monuments and ancient ruins, for whom weeds are the greatest threat.

The shank of this tool is square and tapered and the end is twisted into a spiral. The handle twists as it’s driven on so it won’t ever come off. The steel is quenched in oil to bake in a protective finish that prevents rusting.

Not only for pavement or crevice weeding, but also for ripping open bags of compost or soil and pulling up fibrous roots.

Designed for outside use, this tool should last for many years if properly stored inside a shed or garage when not in use. Coat blades in oil to prevent rusting. The handle will take on a varnish from the natural oils of the hand.

Bob Denman grew up tending his family's garden and playing with his machinist father's drill presses and grinding tools. After college, he worked as a journalist and then in advertising and eventually established his own agency and design studio with his wife. At the age of 37, a motocross accident returned him to his earliest interests. He gardened while rehabbing, and in searching for kneepads to kneel on, he found that those available were mostly inefficiently bound behind the leg, so he invented gardening pants with built-in kneepads. Bob obtained the patent for his invention but did not have the money to enforce it, so when a large gardening company knocked off his invention, he decided to take a bite out of their business and started selling gardening tools. He and his wife, Rita, ran a shop in California in the late 1980s and then relocated to Oregon in 2004.

In the beginning, Bob bought forgings for such tools as trowels and dandelion weeders and put his own handles on them. He also bought esoteric forgings from Europe, but when the company that imported them was sold, he turned to a local blacksmith to make them. The blacksmith, already 70 years old and nearing retirement, told Bob that he could learn blacksmithing himself, and so he began visiting the blacksmith's workshop in the evenings after he closed up shop to drink whiskey and play with fire. Bob’s line of hand-forged tools, sold under the name Red Pig, includes a number of implements that can't be found elsewhere — either based on designs that are antique or from abroad or items that he invented because he thought they would be useful.

Each Red Pig tool is hammered, bent, and cut by hand from steel using an anvil and Bob’s careful labor. In addition to making tools, Bob has been a contributor to Fine Gardening and Horticulture magazines and has always written for New Pioneer Magazine.

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