A plough or plow is a farm tool for loosening or turning the soil before sowing seed or planting. Ploughs were traditionally drawn by oxen and horses but in modern farms are drawn by tractors. A plough may have a wooden, iron or steel frame with a blade attached to cut and loosen the soil. It has been fundamental to farming for most of history. The earliest ploughs had no wheels; such a plough was known to the Romans as an aratrum. Celtic peoples first came to use wheeled ploughs in the Roman era.
No-dig gardening is a non-cultivation method used by some organic gardeners. The origins of no-dig gardening are unclear, and may be based on pre-industrial or nineteenth-century farming techniques. Masanobu Fukuoka started his pioneering research work in this domain in 1938, and began publishing in the 1970s his Fukuokan philosophy of "do-nothing farming" or natural farming, which is now acknowledged by some as the tap root of the permaculture movement. Two pioneers of the method in the twentieth century included F. C. King, Head Gardener at Levens Hall, South Westmorland, in the Lake District of England, who wrote the book "Is Digging Necessary?" in 1946, and a gardener from Middlecliffe in the UK, A. Guest, who in 1948 published the book "Gardening Without Digging". The work of these gardeners was supported by the Good Gardeners Association in the UK. No-dig gardening was also promoted by Australian Esther Deans in the 1970s, and American gardener Ruth Stout advocated a "permanent" garden mulching technique in Gardening Without Work and no-dig methods in the 1950s and 1960s.
In agriculture, a harrow is a farm implement used for surface tillage. It is used after ploughing for breaking up and smoothing out the surface of the soil. The purpose of harrowing is to break up clods and to provide a soil structure, called tilth, that is suitable for planting seeds. Coarser harrowing may also be used to remove weeds and to cover seed after sowing.
The stale seed bed or false seed bed method is a weed control technique used at both the farm and garden scales. In this that the young weeds can then be easily eliminated. By destroying them early, the farmer or gardener eliminates most of that season's annual weeds, which reduces their labor and improves their crop yields.
Weed control is a type of pest control, which attempts to stop or reduce growth of weeds, especially noxious weeds, with the aim of reducing their competition with desired flora and fauna including domesticated plants and livestock, and in natural settings preventing non native species competing with native species.
A spade is a tool primarily for digging consisting of a long handle and blade, typically with the blade narrower and flatter than the common shovel. Early spades were made of riven wood or of animal bones. After the art of metalworking was developed, spades were made with sharper tips of metal. Before the introduction of metal spades manual labor was less efficient at moving earth, with picks being required to break up the soil in addition to a spade for moving the dirt. With a metal tip, a spade can both break and move the earth in most situations, increasing efficiency. A classic spade, with a narrow body and flat tip is suited for digging post holes, and is not to be confused with a "roundpoint" shovel, which has a wider body and tapered tip.
Vegan organicagriculture is the organic production of food and other crops with minimal animal inputs. Vegan organic agriculture is the organic form of animal-free agriculture.
A trowel is a small hand tool used for digging, applying, smoothing, or moving small amounts of viscous or particulate material. Common varieties include the masonry trowel, garden trowel, and float trowel.
A digging stick, sometimes called a yam stick, is a wooden implement used primarily by subsistence-based cultures to dig out underground food such as roots and tubers, tilling the soil, or burrowing animals and anthills. It is a term used in archaeology and anthropology to describe similar implements, which usually consists of little more than a sturdy stick which has been shaped or sharpened and sometimes hardened by being placed temporarily in a fire.
A garden fork, spading fork, or digging fork is a gardening implement, with a handle and a square-shouldered head featuring several short, sturdy tines. It is used for loosening, lifting and turning over soil in gardening and farming, and not to be confused with the pitchfork, a similar tined tool used for moving loose materials such as hay, straw, silage, and manure.
A rake is a broom for outside use; a horticultural implement consisting of a toothed bar fixed transversely to a handle, or tines fixed to a handle, and used to collect leaves, hay, grass, etc., and in gardening, for loosening the soil, light weeding and levelling, removing dead grass from lawns, and generally for purposes performed in agriculture by the harrow.
A cultivator is a piece of agricultural equipment used for secondary tillage. One sense of the name refers to frames with teeth that pierce the soil as they are dragged through it linearly. It also refers to machines that use the rotary motion of disks or teeth to accomplish a similar result. The rotary tiller is a principal example.
A number of common weeding tools are designed to ease the task of removing weeds from gardens and lawns.
This is an alphabetical index of articles related to gardening.
In permaculture, sheet mulching is an agricultural no-dig gardening technique that attempts to mimic the natural soil-building process in forests. When deployed properly and in combination with other permaculture principles, it can generate healthy, productive, and low maintenance ecosystems.
A hori-hori, sometimes referred to as a "soil knife" or a "weeding knife", is a heavy serrated multi-purpose steel blade for gardening jobs such as digging or cutting. The blade is sharp on both sides and comes to a semi-sharp point at the end.
A weed is a plant considered undesirable in a particular situation, growing where it conflicts with human preferences, needs, or goals. Plants with characteristics that make them hazardous, aesthetically unappealing, difficult to control in managed environments, or otherwise unwanted in farm land, orchards, gardens, lawns, parks, recreational spaces, residential and industrial areas, may all be considered weeds. The concept of weeds is particularly significant in agriculture, where the presence of weeds in fields used to grow crops may cause major losses in yields. Invasive species, plants introduced to an environment where their presence negatively impacts the overall functioning and biodiversity of the ecosystem, may also sometimes be considered weeds.
A khurpa is a short handled cutting tool similar to a Trowel with a flat blade used for digging soil and weeding in small gardens or vegetable farms. It is commonly use in small farms or in ridges or rows of vegetables to hoewing or earth up the weeds. It is traditionally used while in a squatting posture. The work khurpa is a word in the Punjabi language.
Homi, also known as a Korean hand plow, is a short-handled traditional farming tool used by Koreans. It is a farming tool that removes grasses from paddies and fields. It is also used when plowing a rice field, planting seeds, plowing up soil, and digging potatoes in fields. It is a farming tool similar to the hoe. It is an important extension of agriculture from the ancient times because the homi was excavated in the Bronze Age historic site of the Pyeongnam Mangsan Daepyeong-ri and the early Iron Age historic site of Yangpyong, Gyeonggi Province.
This glossary of agriculture is a list of definitions of terms and concepts used in agriculture, its sub-disciplines, and related fields, including horticulture, animal husbandry, agribusiness, and agricultural policy. For other glossaries relevant to agricultural science, see Glossary of biology, Glossary of ecology, Glossary of environmental science, and Glossary of botanical terms.
