then you’d better make it one of these
a lot of pro gardeners carry 2 tools on their bodies all day: felco hand pruners (that’s another post) and some version of the “hori-hori” gardening knife. the ones that taught us to garden do, and we love our hori-hori’s like no other tool we use
decent tools of any sort are not easy to find in amerika, don’t know about where you live, but unless you’re fortunate to live near a purveyor of good tools (not walmart or ace hardware, for example) you’re going to be ordering these online
the hori-hori knife
this is a traditional japanese gardening tool. hori-hori means “dig! dig!”
the holster of these is useful too
you can get these from a variety of manufacturers operating in various places
we look for the japanese, carbon steel blade- not a stainless blade of inferior quality. there are good quality stainless versions to be had, but watch out -as always!- for the crappy imitations
Horticulture Guy sells the one that we usually can find and buy. we’ve had 3 or 5 of these. one important piece of advice is to find an agreeable way to colorize your handle, so as not to lose it with your load of weeds or out in the garden somewhere. we use fluorescent marking paint, or tennis-racquet-handle-tape…whatever you like
if your method also protects the wood of the handle against moisture damage, so much the better. that’s the other thing that happens with these, the wood can check and the handle fail if the tool is abused 
snif
as the hg page mentions, ” For a sharper edge and rust resistant knife see the Stainless Steel Hori Hori knife“.
the stainless version
we’re using ours’ mostly for weeding, and the carbon blade is plenty sharp enough there and more prepared for the occasional prying situation with a deep-rooted weed or when unearthing small stones or whatever gubbish one may come across
we’ve had one of these – the same brand as hg offers. the edge is extremely sharp, sharper than we need it to be and a bit dangerous, at least on our jobsites.
if someone really wants a sharp (sharp!) knife that they can use in the soil, like for slicing a lot of roots ? then this is a great choice. it won’t rust, tho our carbon ones haven’t rusted either. (just don’t leave your tools outside for months at a time!)
the stainless blade is less resistant to bending when undue force is applied to it, is why the other one is our mainstay
-one other factor is the length of the blade. you can find longer-blade versions of the knife; it looks like the stainless one pictured is a little longer than the other. we’ve never wanted the blade to be longer than the basic one so far
as of today the carbon steel one is 20 and the stainless 25 bucks from the horticulture guy – a good price
an interesting alternative
Predator Tools makes a great looking, similar-but-different digging knife. they have 2 models, the 75 <-
and the 85
visit their site and you’ll see that these guyz are passionate about what they do
these knives are popular with rockhounds and relic hunters who frequently have to try and pry stuff out of pretty hard ground
these sell for about 45 dollars, which also looks very fair
(the same family that makes these also makes (a different company tho) the great american spade (and boy is it!), the GroundShark – more about that in a future post…)
