Friday afternoon in between getting ready for market and the boy's nap time we set up the Eco weeder and had our first weeding run with actual plants. We successfully weeded a bed of lettuce and I must say the first run was rather smooth. You have to be able to drive pretty darn straight or you can quickly come too close to the plants with the eco wheels, which we did a few times, which then comes the trick of getting back in the proper line to continue weeding. Luckily Derek is pretty steady so it didn't happen very often. Most people with the Eco weeder only use it to weed one row/bed but because our tractor tires are set fairly wide only doing 1 row would be a huge waste of space. We simply push the arms of the tractor over as far as they can go and lock them inplace and then drive down one side of the bed, turn around at the end and come back along the other side. Our off set which Derek built will do the same thing but we did not have the new longer pto shaft that we needed.
Lettuce bed before weeding
Tiny lettuce plants, hard to see but there was alot of tiny corn spurry and pig weed seedlings
After the first side was done
Uprooted weed next to lettuce plant, no we did not stage this photo
Action shot of the discs
Derek doing a final inspection
We did find that it threw a bit of dirt on top of the plants so we are going to experiment with different sized buckets over the discs to see if we can't solve that problem but all in all we are very pleased with the weeder.
Yea for the "Eco Weeder"
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