Hundreds of thousands of weed seeds exist below the soil surface in every acre of most every farm. They can remain in the soil for decades, until the right conditions arise for them to germinate.
Farmers have an ongoing battle with weeds, to keep them from stealing soil nutrients and crowding out crops.
As an organic farm we don't use chemical herbicides or pesticides. We remove weeds by mechanical methods, including hand, hoe, wheeled hoe, farm-all, Einboch, and sometimes, propane torch.
The Einboch is used, pre-seeding, to tickle the soil and expose the roots of any newly sprouted weeds. Sometimes the Einboch can pass the over the same area every few days, to destroy successive phases of newly germinated weed seeds. The idea is to deplete the huge bank of weed seeds which reside in the soil.
A propane flame works only in the days before seeds have sprouted above the soil surface. This is a critical moment when any sprouting weed seeds can be burnt with a very brief sweep of the torch, but without the heat getting past the soil surface where the crop seeds still reside. For example, we might walk over a 50 metre bed in about 90 seconds.
The farm-all is perhaps the most potent tool. It consists of five tines which deploy from a tractor and scrape 1 to 3 inches below the soil surface. The tines are arranged to run between each row of vegetable.
The wheel hoe is the best piece of equipment. It consists of a hoe attached to a wheel. A large area can be covered with a wheel hoe, as much as two to three acres. Beyond that, the farm-all will be appropriate, but it's a much more expensive piece of machinery.
The hand-held hoe is best used to reach close to plants, where you can't reach with the farm-all or the wheel hoe. It could also be used in the space between rows, but there will be a point where the wheel hoe is a better use of time than the hand held hoe.
The human hand is the best weeder. But it's connected to the body and mind of us humans, who're always looking for better and faster ways of doing things.
