If you’re familiar with shovel and spade, you probably aren’t familiar with mattock, which lurks neglected in some corner of your toolshed. Its unusual shape look somewhat like a cross between a pickaxe and an axe, which can be confusing at first. Why use such a strange shape, particularly when a conventional hoe appear to get the work done quite nicely?
Turns out: What you’re hoping to achieve underground are the point. The mattock is no shovel for turning over lots of soil or making holes: It’s meant to break out ground with precision. To make a trench for drainage; to cut through compact soil; to get leverage into tough root systems, there it has nothing like the cutting power of a blade, flat though it may be.
Understanding The Mattock Tool And Its Uses
Understanding the Mattock Design
Mastering its workings will change your approach to tough ground. A mattock is unique because it have a T-shaped head. One side is chisel-type blade used for digging.
How to Use Both Ends
The other side is an adze, which are a flat blade perpendicular to the handle. You can do various jobs with this tool, without having to change tools. Use the chisel end to punch into ground and loosen rocky or clay-like soils.
Use the adze to scrape and shape. Use it to clear away debris and level areas. Why?
Because you don’t have to stop and pick up another tool… You can keep moving. The mattock is sometimes mistakenly identified as a type of pickaxe.
Mattock Versus Pickaxe Differences
But that’s where geometry come in. A pickaxe concentrates force onto a small area to break apart rock. Its point is designed for just such a purpose.
The chisel of a mattock are flat and wider, intended to slice into the soil instead of crack it open. That’s important if you’re digging around in garden bed. You don’t want to destroy structure of the soil all around; you want to loosen it while keeping things intact.
It lift and turns rather than blasting away at stone. Note the adze side. Adzes are seldom used; this broad, flat blade is amazing at cutting back thick roots that is too big to pull by hand.
It’s more like a plane; a blade to shave down wood fiber in one clean stroke after another. For example, when creating a new bed to plant into, the adze will cut out any invading root system or small stump pretty fast. And it makes nice clean lines on sides of your irrigation ditch that are neater and nicer then what raking alone can do.
Choosing the Right Handle and Weight
Practical things like handle length matter, too: If you’re doing fine-tuning (edging flower beds, for instance) or need to work carefully among tender plants, shorter handles will give you better control; if you’re tackling broken-out, hard soil or other tough conditions, longer handles will yield extra power. And again, consider the head weight. Something heavier will dig into hard surfaces with less effort on your part, but it can get wearying to swing again and again.
Balance your needs, your strength, the job at hand, with what feels comfortabley. To make it work well, there is some things you need to do to maintain the tool, but nothing complicated. Roots and rocks beat up metal edges and will dull them over time.
Maintaining and Sharpening Your Mattock
Sharpening both the adze and chisel with either a grindstone or file help keep the cut clean. When the edge isn’t sharp, it don’t bite into the ground as much, but just bounces away. This wastes energy and frustrates the user.
To help prevent rust, store in a dry location and wipe down metal surfaces lightly with oil after each use. This simple habit realy increases the life of the tool. Finally, this is a specialist’s tool that outshines other tools when those others fail.
With a mattock, what would of been a backbreaking, tough job becomes a series of easy swings. When you hit a spot where your fork or spade just won’t go in, the mattock let you dig in and break through. It empowers you while respecting the earth.
Keep one on hand, and soon working over stubborn ground will feel less frustrating and you will work with more confidence. Every stroke makes progress. Resistance becomes a reward as the tool rewards skill.