Tractor Work

by Andy

This past Thursday was our first day in a long time without a group of people here or something else big tugging at our attention. The end of the school year gets quite hectic around here. But Thursday, the garden was screaming at me, asking for attention, and finally there was enough background noise gone that I heard it loud and clear.

I have a rule about gardening: do the easy stuff first. I like to see the biggest impact in the shortest amount of time. Easy stuff means tractor work. It means killing weeds with sharp metal implements that hang down from the tractor, and even driving very slow on the tractor is 10 to 20 times faster than walking along with a hoe. For that matter, walking along with a hoe is 10 to 20 faster than crawling along on your hands and knees hand-pulling weeds.So the first step in weeding the garden to is get as much done with the tractor as possible. If a person jumps right to the hand weeding, the game is over.

Today I tested out a new implement for us. The Einbock tine weeder (middle photo).



The Einbock is a collection of about 100 spring-y steel tines that get dragged behind the tractor. The angle of the tines is easily adjustable. The idea is to get the angle of the tines just right so that they dislodge weeds that are just sprouting, while not dislodging the plants you are trying to cultivate. It is called a blind cultivator, because you don't have to steer it around the plants. It takes faith to just roll roughshod over you little precious plants. I am learning that it also takes practice. If the angle is too aggressive, then it will rip out the little pumpkin plants that Class E lovingly hand planted. If the angle and speed are not aggressive enough, then the weeds laugh at me.

I have learned that if a certain percentage of the garden plants are not displaced, then the Einbock is not gonna kill the weeds either. So after I drive over the garden beds, I have to stop and get off the tractor and do pumpkin triage.

Yesterday I actually spent a good deal of time on onion triage. A slight flaw was revealed in our planting system. It seems about 300 plants (out of 2400 or so) were not planted deep enough and as such were vulnerable to iron blight (our nickname for death caused by metal implements). So I spent a couple hours on my hands and knees replacing the lost onions with stragglers from our greenhouse. I also removed any weeds that had escaped the Einbock, and now the onions are ready to take off.

I am thrilled to be able to use the Einbock this year. Last year was the first year we could use it, because we could finally pull it with the new John Deere tractor that was purchased through a special needs fundraiser at the Auction. Thanks to everyone who helped purchase that tractor, it has already saved many hours of hand weeding.