If you love to garden, grow your own food, paint your yard with color, or cultivate specialty plants for the bees, it is probably fair to say that at some point both the work and the exercise required forced you to stop earlier than you wished. If you are a professional gardener or landscaper, stopping is not a luxury, and you press on with arms, back, and various muscles aching. The gardening limitation is not your desire, it is your tools.
As a fervent gardener, when a catastrophic hand accident caused the loss of some fingers, fingers used to grip and manage tools, it became clear to me that finding a solution which allowed me to continue my passion was mandatory. There have been many prototypes and incarnations of this tool along the way – if you have read the website you are familiar with the journey. I call it the Earth Lifter Tool, or ELT. It was first designed to lift potatoes with one hand. However, as time moved ahead, I also found the ELT has many more practical and important applications.
Historically man used his hand as a shovel, and the fingers were the forks, until craftsmen began carving, curving, and finally forging these shapes into actual tools. Arms and hands that previously acted as a shovel or a fork evolved into tools that were lengthened for leverage, a pretty cool concept. The problem of course is that the entire body is enlisted in the use of these tools, and using them requires twisting, bending, lifting against gravity and resistance, causing your spine to become the fulcrum. It is the main reason you stop gardening for the day, or grab a couple pain pills.
I knew there must be a better way. Isn’t the real purpose of a tool to augment the power and control you have over a job. For example, pulling a trigger on a drill rather than driving the screw in by hand is a much smarter approach. The mechanical advantage is built into the tool.
Since necessity has to do with invention, I discovered through the prototypes that a two-handed tool could be used with one hand by creating a built-in fulcrum to safeguard the spine, as well as shifting the weight restrictions. This was an early realization, and sent me immediately into Archimedean Physics and Pythagorean Geometry.
The ELT turns out to be an extremely sane tool for physical and anatomical reasons, as well as the psychological reasons which accompany body comfort. The bend on the back of the tool creates the fulcrum which allows this new class of fork to accomplish many tasks. The bend allows us to maintain the proper anatomical orientation of our spine, front to back. Bending properly is important for exercising our muscles, and we all require motion to remain healthy. Movement with resistance is how we evolved to ensure longevity. We will discuss proper, varied whole foods in another blog.
As I mentioned above, the ELT can be used with one hand, as the fulcrum carries the weight and gives the user greater leverage. For many folks who are disabled on one side, arthritic, elderly (did you say knees?), folks with a fragile disc, they will be able to resume their love of gardening again. Many will start a garden because of ELT’s sod busting uses. Hobby farmers can come out of retirement. Harvesting will be twice as fast with one-third the effort.
ELT is a multi-purpose and multi-season tool. You can pull up grass, remove rocks, till the soil, mix the amendments, pull up weeds and create the space where you can plant. A few months later, the ELT can LIFT your potatoes and root crops, lift your beautiful bulb tubers, and pull out stalks and stumps. Year after year you have the garden you desire while you invest, only once, in a tool that will become your lifetime food and exercise machine.