Fail Better Farm, Montville
June 2 and 3, 2009
We visited Clayton Carter, Fail Better Farm, Montville, Maine, this week to test the Weed Master in several crops on his diverse organic vegetable farm.
Here are some images from these tests; I’ll update the post further next week.
Cultivating garlic with the Weed Master and sweeps
Sweeps attached to parallel linkage units entering a 3-row bed of garlic
Sweeps even controlled some large horsetail weeds in fava beans
Fava beans cultivated with disk hillers and then sweeps
Using the depth control wheels as row markers
Tags: cultivation, Maine, organic vegetable farm, organic weed control, weed control
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September 3, 2009 at 10:17 am
It seems like that above the garlic field is covered with straw in my view.
In case of such a mulched ground, does it work well?
I doubt which is better to control weeds between the weed Master and straw mulches.
The labour to push the tool and and the efficiency of weed removal?
Anyway, weeding is definitely hard job!
September 3, 2009 at 11:37 am
Indeed, this level of residue was a challenge and we had to stop frequently to unplug the sweeps. Nevertheless, the sweeps were able to work quite well in the firm, overwintered soil of the garlic.
The best approach here would be to move the straw first, likely by hand. The straw is effective for suppressing annuals, but often perennials, especially dandelion and quackgrass, will thrive in this environment where spring tillage is not performed.