Love this knife! It's very sharp so be careful. Worked great to cut down woody stemmed herbs like oregano. FYI.. That's in the mint family. Didn't know that and it took over a bed before I knew it. This knife to the rescue. Also has measurements on it so you can see how far down you have dug and it has a nifty holder with a strap. Overall, I will most likely buy another for my son to use out in the garden as well.

I bought it with buckhorn plantain in mind. I had been using a weeder that looked like a wide screwdriver with a notch in the end. I'd have to pinch and pull a weed so hard that my fingers quickly got sore. The Hori Hori slides in more easily. It cuts more roots so I don't have to pull hard. I can work faster and keep at it indefinitely. That weed was soon hard to find in my yard.

Dallisgrass is worse. It's hard to find an herbicide that will kill it selectively. It can make a lawn look overgrown four days after mowing. If it hasn't rained in a week, it can still be wet enough to clog a mower and leave a mess. Like crabgrass, it turns brown at the end of summer. Unlike crabgrass, it's perennial. The mass of roots gets wider every year.

My Hori Hori digs it out better than anything else I've tried. If I can catch a plant before the roots spread, the Hori Hori will get it in a flash. If there's a patch of roots, I slide the tool under, about 2cm deep, and hear the delightful snapping of roots. I can snap more roots by twisting the tool. Then I make another incision beside the first. With my other hand I pull the leaves so I know where there are still roots.

Over the past month, I've used a crabgrass herbicide several times. If it will kill dallisgrass, it will need more than a month, but it has slowed the growth. That keeps the lawn looking better longer and gives me time to go after the worst specimens with my Hori Hori. I'm winning!

The day it arrived, there was a lot wrong with the tool. The sheath required one hand to hold the stiff leather strap open while I removed the tool with my other hand. The handle was clumsy to hold because it was too big and the edges too square. The cross section is 30 x 18mm. By comparison, the handle of a larger kitchen knife, made to last generations, is only 18 x 18mm, and the corners are much rounder. The butt of the handle was flat, with 4 edges and 4 corners. I've never before seen a knife handle like that. When I shoved the blade into the ground, the corners hurt my palm!

With a side grinder, I ground off the corners of the butt at 45 degrees until I had a sort of octagonal shape. Then I rounded it into a sort of semicircle. That's much more comfortable to my palm.

Next, I went around the wood faces with a set of rasps and files, rounding the edges. That made the handle less clumsy to grasp.

I left the sheath on a table with weights to hold the ends of the strap out flat. The next day, it stayed out of my way. Occasionally, it would get in the way, so I cut it off. I've worn that tool daily for two months, in the sheath on a belt over one shoulder and under the other arm, and it has never fallen out.

The plain edge is rounded like a butter knife. That's adequate for cutting weed roots in soil. A sharp edge would be less durable and more dangerous. In case I ever need to sharpen it, I tried the included sharpener. It must have been intended for small items like fish hooks. I tried a large, coarse sharpening stone, secured on a board so I could apply pressure. Sharpening would have been a long task. The steel was too hard and there was too much to remove. It may never need sharpening. If it does, I'll start with a grinder.

**** Update, 2 years later: There has been almost no dallisgrass since the first year. I got only the worst clumps with the hori hori, and I didn't see any kills from repeated use of crabgrass spray. Maybe the spray kept it from storing energy to survive the winter.

After eradicating buckhorn plantain, they say you have to get the seedlings the second year. I didn't see much the second year. There was much more the third year. It was a wet spring. Maybe they were plants that past conditions had kept too small to notice.

The hori hori was harder to push into the ground than in the past, and it tended to push roots aside instead of cutting them. I sharpeed the end with a side grinder. The included sharpening rod wouldn't have done the job.

This is one of those useful tools that you have to be careful with. I saw several of these that looked a little dangerous: the guard was tiny or nonexistent. This one is sufficient to feel safe using it. The blade is sharp enough that if you held it tight and slid down, you'd definitely get cut. Having said that, I'm getting older, so I don't have the strength to push a normal tool into the ground to get next to roots, so I need the tool to work better. The sharpness of this does the trick for me. (I always wear leather gardening gloves - it took a while to get used to it. It's not because my tools were so sharp, but because I didn't want to grab a bug with my bare hands. )

Quality for the price , nice rawhide knife holder and sharpening tool. Blade it self thick and very durable, appears to be quality stainless steel.

Use this garden knife for metal detecting and love it. It can dig, cut, and chop throw soil and roots easily and is able to excavate metal detector targets maintaining a small profile with less damage if at all to the retrieval area and its ground cover. I also use it for my gardening tasks as it far exceeds the multiple tools I've used in the past for the same chores. The sheath is great as well being that it's thickened from top to bottom where the cutting edge of the tool might come in contact with when removing and replacing it from the sheath. I recommend this to anyone that is thinking about purchasing a great all in one tool that suits many needs. ✌ðŸ»â¤ï¸ðŸ¤'ðŸ»