Dreams can come true

The other day I was yearning for a couple of different farm implements. Well, this weekend, one of the things we needed kind of fell into our lap. I saw an ad for a used set of cultivators, and we snapped them up. This set up may not look like much, but the metal is solid, and the clamps, standards, and tines are all in good working order.

Cultivators are basically different shaped pieces of metal that you set at certain widths, and then drag behind the tractor at a very shallow depth (like maybe, 1 inch deep). The result is that the different shaped shovels or sweeps that you drag through the soil disturb or uproot the weeds in your vegetable bed, while your rows of crop plants pass through the gaps you have left in your set-up. This is how vegetable farmers controlled weeds before the advent of large scale herbicide use, and cultivators still have some applications in conventional vegetable production today.

The problem of course, is that while there is a niche market for organic vegetables, there is not really a cost-effective market for small scale farm implements, like these cultivators. That is why the new implements I linked to last week are so expensive. We were very lucky to have found these used cultivators -- I almost never see them advertised, and when they are advertised, they don't last long. Plus, of course, these cultivators cost only a small fraction of the new stuff.

Now I can't wait until spring to break them in.