Source:
Vegetable Farmers and their Weed-Control Machines [DVD]. V. Grubinger and M.J. Else. 1996. University of Vermont Extension. Available for purchase at http://www.uvm.edu/vtvegandberry/Videos/weedvideo.htm (verified 31 Dec 2008).
This is a Vegetable Farmers and their Weed Control Machines video clip.
Watch the video clip on YouTube at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T6_qz1pXiEs
Featuring
Bob Gray, Four Corners Farm. Newbury, VT.
Audio Text
This cultivation equipment here is called a Buddingh In-row Weeder. The 'in-row' comes from the fact that it literally will weed around the plant. You can see my fingers here. The rubber fingers go like this around the plant and scrub the weeds out. And there’s little metal prongs on the bottom of the finger wheel that spins the fingers. On transplanted plants like strawberry or broccoli and even fast growing plants like beans it does a beautiful job. Onions in a single row, anything that can take a little bit of scrubbing without being pulled out.
Today this is just about the right timing to cultivate. The weeds are just coming through. This thing here will just take them and actually flick them out of the ground. If you let them get too big it won’t work. It has to be done when the weeds are an inch or less in height. Once you get past that stage then you get screwed up. We love it and it does an incredible job. It’s like getting fifteen people hoeing all at once and you’re just doing all the work yourself.
It’s mounted on an Allis Chalmers G tractor. They don’t make them anymore. They were made in the forties and early fifties. A little light weight tractor with the motor in the rear and you can see perfectly what you are doing. It turns on a dime.
For the actual adjustment on this Buddingh weeder, it does all kinds of things. It goes in and out, it goes forward and back, these rear things can be turned around so they’ll throw dirt in toward the plant or reversed so they’ll throw dirt away from the plant. It’s a very versatile piece of equipment.
One of the drawbacks is you can see right here it doesn’t like wet soil, but you shouldn’t be cultivating in the rain anyway, because the dirt will pack up underneath. You have to get off as well and bang on it to shake the dirt off so it will do what it is supposed to do. But in dry soil, sandy soil, it will work in stones as long as there are not too many of them.
Generally with this machine you go fairly slow, maybe two to three miles per hour, depending on the crop and how strong it is.
So we always have something in the front weeding around the plant and something in the back covering the wheel tracks. But it’s more than that. With the other tractors that have the Lillistons on them, the Lilliston can actually do more work than just covering the wheel tracks. The front cultivator, whatever it may be, a sweep or a shovel or fingers like, this works around the plant and the Lilliston can come around and finish up or level out or throw more dirt or hill depending on what you want to do. So you’re always trying to figure out what you want to do and put a piece of equipment that will do the most good.
This video project was funded in part by the Northeast Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education Program (USDA)
