La Campagnole is a tool created by La Fabriculture, a workshop of handcrafted tools based in the south of France. (http://www.lafabriculture.fr). It is inspired by “the grelinette”, a basic tool of permaculture, a spade with about ten teeth, up to 80 cm wide, used to ventilate plots of culture by hand on their full width.
The asset of the “Campagnole” compared to the “Grelinette” is that it is equipped with a clods breaking system, consisting of flexible strips, placed on the ground, while the spades come to the surface. The soil passes between these horizontal slats, rigid or flexible for stony soils, and is crumbled.
This operation allows, with a single gesture, to decompact the soil to about twenty centimeters deep (deeper than a tiller would go), and to refine it by crumbling the clumps in a simple gesture. A quick rake is then sufficient to prepare the seed bed.
