hoe one's row

present singular third person hoes one's row · participle present hoeing one's row · participle past hoed one's row · past hoed one's row

1. idiomaticTo do one's share of a job.

   There was a time when, jocund as the day, The toiler hoed his row and sung his lay, Found something gleeful in the very air, And solace for his toiling everywhere.

   1913, Paul Laurence Dunbar, The Complete Poems of Paul Laurence Dunbar, To The South

   2 more examples

   I have to begin where I left off; but you cannot realize but that you have to take one jump away ahead, when you come to leave your bodies and go into the spirit world. That is not so, for you will have to commence to hoe your row where you left off.

   1857, Heber C. Kimball, Journal of Discourses, A Discourse […] Delivered in the Bowery, Great Salt Lake City, June 7, 1857.

   “I ain’t sharing my room with assassins. Gilvey is ignorant and a brute. If you say so I’ll join you and we’ll lick him. We could do it easy, only it wouldn’t help you much. For the men would say I had to help you hoe your row.”

   1911, Hugh Pendexter, The Young Timber-cruisers; or, Fighting the Spruce Pirates, =chapter 2

   Synonyms: do one's bit