The Walden Effect: Farming, simple living, permaculture, and invention.

Whizbang shoulder yoke

Whizbang shoulder yokeIf I had to pick a single project in The Project Whizbang Idea Book for Gardeners that is the most useful, it would probably be the shoulder yoke.  Call me crazy, but I've wanted a yoke for years.  The idea is that by balancing a load on a piece of wood that spans your shoulders, it's much easier to carry heavy things.  And while wheelbarrows provide lower-work hauling on level ground, a yoke would make many of our jobs much simpler during mud season or when wandering through the woods in search of stump dirt.

The trouble with make a yoke is that the tools are traditionally carved out of a solid piece of wood, and most of us don't have that skill.  Enter the Plant Whizbang shoulder yoke, which is built by screwing together three pieces of 1X6, plus a little hardware and padding.

Mark and I are both itching to give this project a try, so hopefully you'll hear more about it in later posts.  In the meantime, I've included one of Kimball's drawings to get you thinking about homemade shoulder yokes.  (I highly recommend checking out the rest of the chapter, though, to simplify constructing your own yoke.)  And if you beat us to this project, I hope you'll send in a photo of your finished project along with a note about how it works for you!


This post is part of our Idea Book for Gardeners lunchtime series.  Read all of the entries:


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About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.



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This has been working its way up my project list since I bought Herrick's book. I've bought the timber, chains, carabiners, etc - just need to find the time to build it!
Comment by Darren (Green Change) Sat Mar 22 05:52:10 2014





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