Weed It Out

You might suspect, between the chickens and the garden and the rest of my homesteading projects, that I'm living quite the agrarian life these days. Nothing would confirm it so well as the following set of photos from a day back in July when Nick and I helped our friend Marty weed his bean field.

Yes, our feet really were at least as dirty as they look here. 

This weeder is an amazing implement. It attaches to Marty's tractor, which he drives down the rows of beans.

The weeder has four spinning discs that flank two bean rows at a time. The discs have tines attached to them that poke down into the soil and grab onto weeds, pulling them out by the roots (ideally).

Each disc is attached to a handle. That means four handles in all, lined up with two seats. That's where we came in.

As the tractor rumbled down the row in a cloud of dust, we hung onto the handles, concentrated on the plants below us, and used the handles as joysticks to maneuver the spinning discs and take out as many weeds as possible. It's video-gaming meets agriculture.

This could be just the thing to get all those couch-potato kids suffering from nature-deficit disorder back into the great outdoors, don't you think? While we're at it, we'll make Roundup completely unnecessary, too.

Anyway, we had fun. Then we took a mulberry break.

A few more passes through the bean field ensured that our purple mulberry stains were thoroughly blackened with more dust. (See, when we get the children away from their flickering screens and out into the fields, we'll also solve the problem of the new hyper-clean human who, doused in anti-bacterial soap, never develops the immunities bestowed by the proverbial peck of dirt.)

Well, whether or not we solve the world's ills, there's nothing quite so peaceful as the sight of a freshly weeded field at sunset.