A pitchfork or hay fork is an agricultural tool used to pitch loose material, such as hay, straw, manure, or leaves. It has a long handle and usually two to five thin tines designed to efficiently move such materials.
The term is also applied colloquially, but inaccurately, to the garden fork. While similar in appearance, the garden fork is shorter and stockier than the pitchfork, with three or four thicker tines intended for turning or loosening the soil of gardens.
A bident is a two-pronged implement resembling a pitchfork. In Renaissance art, the bident is associated with the god Pluto.
In cutlery or kitchenware, a fork (from Latin: furca 'pitchfork') is a utensil, now usually made of metal, whose long handle terminates in a head that branches into several narrow and often slightly curved tines with which one can spear foods either to hold them to cut with a knife or to lift them to the mouth.
Tines (/ˈtaɪnz/; also spelled tynes), prongs or teeth are parallel or branching spikes forming parts of a tool or natural object. They are used to spear, hook, move or otherwise act on other objects. They may be made of wood, bone, metal, or similar materials.
The number of tines on tools varies widely a pitchfork may have just two, a garden fork may have four, and a rake or harrow many. Tines may be blunt, such as those on a fork used as an eating utensil; or sharp, as on a pitchfork; or even barbed, as on a trident. The terms tine and prong are synonymous. A tooth of a comb is a tine. The term is also used on musical instruments such as the Jew's harp, tuning fork, guitaret, electric piano, music box or mbira (kalimba) which contain long protruding metal spikes ("tines") which are plucked to produce notes.
A sheaf (/ʃiːf/; pl.: sheaves) is a bunch of cereal-crop stems bound together after reaping, traditionally by sickle, later by scythe or, after its introduction in 1872, by a mechanical reaper-binder.
Traditional hand-reapers, using scythes and working as a team, cut a field of grain clockwise, starting from an outside edge and finishing in the middle. Scything leaves a windrow of cut stems to the left of the reaper and, if cut skillfully, leaves the seed heads more or less aligned. These are then picked up and tied into sheaves by the sheavers, who traditionally use other cut stems as ties. These sheavers, or a following team, then stand the sheaves up in stooks to dry. Three to eight sheaves make up each stook, which forms a self-supporting A-frame with the grain-heads meeting at the top. This keeps the grain well ventilated, and off the ground allowing it to dry and discouraging vermin.The drying sheaves are later either placed by hand or pitched onto a cart. The traditional sheaf pitchfork has a long wooden handle, two short tynes and a rounded back to make the placing of sheaves easy. The gathered sheaves are then either built into stacks (thatched stacks could be over 20' high) or taken to a barn for further drying before being threshed to separate the grain from the stems.
A garden fork, spading fork, or digging fork (in the past also an asparagus fork, the same name as a very different utensil) is a gardening implement, with a handle and a square-shouldered head featuring several (usually four) short, sturdy tines. It is used for loosening, lifting and turning over soil in gardening and farming, and not to be confused with the pitchfork, a similar tined tool used for moving (or throwing) loose materials such as hay, straw, silage, and manure.