I used to have a spade, which was my favourite spade! It saw lots of action around the yard when we were doing some of the original work to set us up for growing our own food. That included, although I shudder to think about it today, a lot of double digging in the original veggie patch area. It was a well-used spade.
I was working on preparing some soil for planting, and to drive the spade into the ground I placed both feet on the step, or top, of the blade and applied my body weight to the spade as I usually did to achieve the desired result. Rather than doing what I expected and sliding effortlessly into the earth, it bent forward and catapulted me off. What had happened is the blade had bent forward in the middle and one side of it had developed a sizeable crack. This caused mass consternation, or at least consternation for me!
After some consideration I decided to weld it up. I am was not an expert, well pretty much I was a beginner at that stage, but I could run a bead of weld. So I was able to use my stick welder to run a bead that held the crack together, but did not have the gear or knowledge to conduct any subsequently required heat treatment. I am sure those of you who are skilled in the art are nudging each other and saying “it won’t last” and sure enough it didn’t! It cracked again, worse this time.
To make some use of it, I applied my angle grinder to the broken end and rounded it out so that it had a curved cutting edge rather than a straight one. My idea (after seeing those half-moon edgers in the hardware) was to contour it and use it to edge the gutter, paths etc. It did work, sort of, but did require a fair bit of effort. What it did turn out to ideal for was to remove banana ‘pups’ from the parent plant so they could be replanted elsewhere. Winner!
It was just a case of placing the blade between the two banana plants to be separated and then, using the time-honoured technique of jamming my foot on one of the steps and pushing the modified spade down between them. It has proved itself very admirable for this task on quite a number of occasions.
While I would not recommend the mutilation of a functioning spade, I would recommend you consider this if you ever find yourself lying on the ground and your favourite spade suffering from a severe crack in the blade.
