My tools are old and I am not sure what the name was when I got them, but you can look at the Ken Ho weeder, 550w flexrake, and a cheap hoe that I cut into 60 degree "V". I also have heard that a cobra head was good. I think they are all good designs and work well. A lot will depend on what you are comfortable with.

I pull, but I pay for it the next day sometimes. I have a little hand shovel that I will use sometimes for digging around a stubborn weed. I need to get a new pair of hand pruners, or learn how to oil/sharpen the ones I have.

I pull small weeds and dig larger ones out with an earth fork. But I usually can't do it two days in a row.

my wrists and thumbs hurt when I did with a trowel or other things, and I can only tell you what saved me--a cobra head garden tool. I weed with it and I dig holes with it and now no more pain. there is a video on it on youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x7cezsg5GBU

I have that one, and LOVE it. But my yard is way to wet right now. Sometimes I wish I had the long handle one, but really, that hand tool is awesome.

Right now, I pull, toss on the lawn, and wait till the next rain removed my soil from the roots before tossing the weed for good.

Take it easy, it does not need to be done all in one day. ;)

Moni

Moni, your yard is too dry? Can we send you some of our puddles? :)

Our TV weather man in Ft. Smith said we have had over 18" of rain 1n 27 days. May has really been wet, and it is raining now. Many of my plants are turning yellow.

Lisa, it was a typo! My yard is to wet!

Moni

I usually just pull the weeds by hand and that works well if I am getting them while they are young. If they are older and I didn't seem them lurking there in the midst of some desirable plants, sometimes I'll use a transplanting trowel to dig them out----a transplanting trowel is like a regular trowel only a lot more narrow so you can use it in between desirable plants without disturbing their roots so much. I also have a hand-hoe, an earth fork and a scuffle hoe. I vary what I use depending on the situation----the right tool for a small weed in sandy loam may not be the right tool for Johnson grass or bermuda grass in dry clay, for example.

I also have a hand-tool sized half-moon hoe (with a 12" handle, not a longer full-sized 4' or 5' handle) that I can use to slice off tough weeds just below the soil surface. It is really sharp and I have to be careful with it or I'll slice off plants I didn't intend to remove but it is great for slicing off tree saplings that pop up from nuts buried by the squirrels.

I second Moni's suggestion to go slow and take your time. I just weed a portion of the garden every day, in what seems like endless rounds of weeding. Trying to do too much wears me out and makes my hands hurt all night and even the next day. Most years I weed early and often and then mulch and don't have a huge weed problem later on in the gardening year. This year the excess rainfall has made the mulch decompose really fast and it has largely kept me out of the garden, so I feel like the weeds are winning the battle at this point, but I intend to win the war.....eventually.

Here are my two all time favorite hand tools, called here, the Hand Hoe and the Ho-Mi.

http://www.johnnyseeds.com/c-310-short-handled-tools.aspx

But the one, without which, I would feel totally lost, is the Japanese Draw Hoe, which, apparently, is only sold by Lee Valley Tools. I just bought a second, as my six year old one is getting a little rickety. I have the short handled version. But it could easily be replaced/out done by the hand hoe. The long handled Japanese Draw Hoe is my mainstay. Using it I can do some pretty detailed weeding, from a standing position. I can also go through and "whack out" swathes of large weeds, stopping with a pitch fork to shake the dirt from them and load into a wheelbarrow. I often just carry it with me when I walk out to the garden. I've found I can choke up on it, and use it like the hand hoe, even like a trowel (Last week I used it to plant peppers.)

Incidentally, I had my spading fork, from Lee Valley, for about 5 years, when the handle broke. Okay, so I thought I was digging up a little rock, and it wasn't little. They no longer sell the English made fork which I had. So I called them up, just asking what they would recommend for a replacement. The customer service rep looked me up in their records and said, "That fork had a 10 year warranty. I'm sending you a form to fill out and you can send it back to us for a refund." I love their customer service!

George

Tahlequah, OklahomaLee Valley - Japanese Draw Hoes

George, I am surprised you managed to break the handle of the spading fork as I thought LV's tools were virtually unbreakable (grin), but I am not surprised about their customer service. They're the best! I was disappointed when they dropped their English-made tools but time marches on and merchandise changes, and I hate that because with garden tools, it seems like many companies are making them more lightweight and more cheaply which translates to lower quality most of the time. When I find something I really like, I often go back and buy a second one so I'll have it in case something happens to the first one.

My half-moon hoe is almost identical to the small-handled Japanese Draw hoe, by the way, and I often use it to flick an undesirable pest, like a squash bug, onto the ground and then chop it right in half. The hoe is so sharp that I have to be careful about touching the edge with my fingers or I can cut them. I've had it forever.....years and years.....and never even have had to sharpen it. I don't know why it has held the sharp edge for so long without sharpening, but I am glad it has.

It is so wet here right now that the weeds are practically uprooting themselves to get up out of the wet ground. I've never found weeds so easy to pull in my entire life, but I do have to toss them on the ground and let the soil dry off before I can shake the clump of soil off the weed roots. After all these years of improving the soil, I'm not about to carry the good stuff out of the garden on the weed roots.

I use a light tilling in the spring when they really are trying to come up. weed whacker the rest of the time. I will pull by hand where I need too. I also find that a lot of weeds are actually quite pretty and beneficial so I only pull the stuff I know I don't like.

My wife gets somewhat exasperated with me when we weed together. She wants to pick a chunk of garden and "nuke it," meaning, eliminate everything. I too tend to find volunteers and beneficial weeds, which I like to leave.

good luck with getting rid of everything without using chemicals over and over. Best thing you can do is provide such a dense planting after the first time that nothing below gets any sun. or you could use weed mats I guess.