What is a pickaxe used for?

What is a pick?

A terracing pickaxe is a very simple tool. It is in fact one of the oldest tools in the world. The pickaxe is used in the garden for major terracing work and for working in stony or particularly hard soil.

A pickaxe consists of a handle and a heavy hardened steel working head fixed at 90° to that handle. This working head has two opposite ends: a point for ‘picking’, that is to say striking and digging in stony or excessively hard places, and a flat rectangular blade for digging in looser soil.

Pickaxe handle can be made of wood (beech, elm, eucalyptus, hickory…) or of composite material (Terracing pickaxe with Novagrip handle). A wooden handle is more economical, but pickaxes with composite handles are lighter and more comfortable to use. Handle should be 90 cm to 1 m long.

Warning! What is sometimes called a “piochon” in farming or gardening is in fact a grub hoe with adze and blade.

Some pick heads are made with a double point, instead of a point and a blade. In that case these were mining tools: they were called “rivelaines”.

What is a pickaxe used for?

A pickaxe head is made up of two distinct parts: the pick and the bit. Each of these parts is used for a specific task.

• The pick is used to: clear stones from land, grub out stumps, pull out large roots or to “attack” the first stage of a large hole (for example when digging a pond) in compacted soils.
• The bit, that is the rectangular “blade”, is used to dig planting holes and trenches in particularly hard soils, and to loosen the soil a little like a very narrow-bladed hoe and to cut large roots. This blade can also break the soil crust or remove weeds.