Weeding Tools and Techniques

today we're going to talk about weeding tools and techniques typically used on market farms and this will primarily be hand tools so anything from wheel hoes to tine weeders to flame weeders and so we're going to show you the features of each one and show you how to use them so in the front we have starting from right to left you have a collinear hoe a push hoe a tine weeder a large stirrup hoe a smaller stirrup hoe or hula hoe and just a little um little wire weeder that i made from an old landscape staple and i'll show you how to make those too but they have long handle and short handle wire wheeler weeders that you can purchase in the back one two three we've got three wheel hoes here this one is an old planet junior one easily a hundred years old or older still works great this is a high arch double wheel hoe for going over large plants and this is an earthway large or yeah large wheel hoe and it's got a stirrup attachment to it and on the left here is the flame weeder this style of home is called a stirrup hoe because it resembles the stirrup that you might put your foot in when you're riding horseback and so the small one uh it's a hula hoe this is just a regular stirrup hoe and these unlike the old hoes that you'd see in the movies you know used in the 30s and stuff these are what you'll probably be using most often on a market farm and these are omni-directional so you can go front and back with this there's a little bit of play on these and what this does is just cuts the roots off under the soil level and the small ones for hand weeding when you're when you're down on your knees just cleaning cleaning the rows but this long-handled one um it's got a grip on the end you hold it like this and you just go back and forth you can just pull toward you or just go back and forth down the row and it'll again cut the roots off right below the soil not turning the soil over exposing new seeds and this is probably the most widely used tool that you'll use on a market farm stirrup this is a collinear hoe and the feature of this is a very very small single direction blade you might wonder well what can i do with such a tiny thing it's actually perfect if you're planting lettuces or spinach or something that has a tight spacing and this little blade and long handle allows you to go in between each of the little plants and just scuff up the soil and kill those threads and so you can go down the line in between the plants and it actually is a very handy and frequently used tool on a market form this is a long handled push hoe and so unlike other hose where you're going back and forth and maybe even pulling toward you this is strictly made for pushing down a row so you just kind of lock your arm it has a push handle at the end and you just push and it cuts weeds off just under the soil and you just walk down the line cutting the roots of the weeds off and i find this mostly handy going in between plants that have uh weeds that have already started growing maybe three or four inches tall or going down the uh the rows in the high tunnel or hoop house just to clean them up so it just cuts through roots off below the surface and the weeds die off the nice thing about it is it doesn't turn the soil over exposing more more weed seeds so it just cuts them off below the surface and you've got a nice stale bed on top so you can use just about anything to hand weed in a market farm uh a very common tool is a what's called a wire weeder so it's just really it's kind of a thick gauge wire with a handle uh you can find them just small ones like this this one i made myself um but you can buy them from johnny's or never sink so you've got short handle ones and you've got ones that are at the end of long long handles and this again just disrupts the soil killing off those thread stage weeds and and they're they're very easy to use they have some with interchangeable blades so or interchangeable wires and so instead of a narrow wire you can get a thick wire in all sorts of different dimensions and they're very nice if you're doing lettuces and spinach and things that are tightly spaced once weeds are established these are almost impossible to use because they don't have a cutting blade on them but when you're still at the thread stage or even before you think you need to weed just take one of these down your rows and it'll prevent the recently germinated weed seeds from ever growing into a full plant what i'm holding here is called a tine weeder there are many different versions of it but all of them have thin flexible and what you'd primarily use this for are crops that have that you've direct seeded and that have a long tap root so carrots and daikon radishes these are perfect for and so what they do right after you've planted your carrots and they've started coming up you just drag this down the lime over over your carrots because they have a long tap root and this pulls out all the weeds that have really shallow tap roots so the one the thread stage weeds and maybe the purslane that's just germinated this will just rip that right out of the ground and leave the carrots in the ground and so it's great for weeding carrot beds and things like that once the weeds get too established this won't do anything and so you've got to use this early on right after uh maybe a week or so after the carrot seeds and daikon seeds have germinated just so you know there's a deep tap root in the ground and and this will work really well for you all right so now i'm going to talk about the wheel hoes the different options for that this is an antique planet junior wheel hoe late 1800s early 1900s the only place you can find these are on ebay and garage sales and the person i got this room got pretty upset when i told them i'd actually be using it farming because you'll see people put them in front of their houses and in their gardens as a decorative feature but these things are so well made but they work great and they last and you can still find parts for them which is awesome and so it uh it has a single wheel in the front it's a small wheel but it's got a single wheel and then a push handle a double push handle and what you do for real hoes you just this has oh this also has sweeps on it they're all different features you can get for it but this has i have three sweeps added in and so you just rest the sweeps on the ground you you don't go too deeply and you just walk with this and it cuts the weeds out as you walk what i have here is a double wheel high arch hoe from haas and the feature of this is the high arch in the middle that allows you to go over larger plants so if you have a kale bed or charred bed that's already established this is a great one for going over those taller plants and the two wheels allow you to straddle the plant and you've got sweeps on both sides and so it just um the plant is right here and it just cultivates on both sides of it killing off the weeds so you've got nice weed-free area on both sides of the plant so this is a time saver most wheel hoes you can only go down one side at a time and so this way you're doing both sides of the plant at once it requires a little more pushing on your part so a little more upper body strength but it does work very well this one right here is my favorite wheel hoe we do a lot of wheel hoeing on my farm just to clean up the sides of each of the rows and this one is from earthway uh they have two different models one that's all tubular steel and one that is wooden um handles with tubular steel and so i have that one and it has lasted seven years and we've we've used and abused this and it's it's kept going and you can find these on amazon or at the solder's produce uh supply catalog or nalts and the feature of this what i like is it's got the large wheel which makes it a lot easier to push as you go along the smaller wheels if your soil is loose or if you have rocks it's it jams them where this large wheel just rolls over just about anything and on this one it's um they have lots of attachments for it but my favorite attachment is stirrup hoe attachment and so it's got a nice blade along here this is about eight inches or nine inches wide and so you just you stand to the side of your plant lock your arms in place you make sure it's at the right adjustment for your height and just walk and drag that stirrup in the soil and it'll cut the roots off of the plants as you go along off of all the weeds and it saves you a lot of time [Music] what we have here is a flame weeder so this is a walk behind flame weeder it's got five burners on it and the feature is you've got a propane tank you can carry it which gets pretty heavy or you can put it on a backpack frame you've got it the control valve in the handle you've got a wheel in the front and you've got the five burners going right here and what you'd use this for is for carrot beds and pretty much you only use it for carrots because the interesting interesting thing about carrots is that the the germination time for carrot seeds is about 10 days where most weed seeds will germinate in about five to seven days and so what this allows you to do it allows you to plant your carrot bed you irrigate it to try to get all the weed seeds to germinate and then after about five days you take this over the bed and just flame it and you don't you're not cooking the bed you're not trying to char the soil you're just going over at a walk regular walking speed and just burning those thread staged weeds and then that gives you a nice stale bed for those carrots a few days later to germinate and grow up in so now i'm going to show you how to use a flame weeder this is one that i picked up from flameweeders.com and so some of the features are before you start you've got you'll have to have a propane tank probably a large capacity one you can hold it it gets really heavy if you do as you're walking down the row or you can get a backpack frame for it and depending on how comfortable you are holding a propane tank and a flame thrower pretty much um you can carry this on your back and it's a lot it's a lot easier on the body uh other features of this are you've got another shut off valve a safety shut off valve here there's a twist regulator here to to figure out um what the ideal setting is for the torch and then there's there's this handle and when it's in the up position it's just got a pilot light burning on all the burners when it's down then it releases the full force of the gas and then it's working well and a couple other features of this um you've got the wheel here if you just a word rewarding if you park this for too long with this running you will start melting this wheel so watch out for that and this has a wind guard on it which is really nice because it's not always going to be optimum optimal conditions to be doing this and so this wind guard on both sides keeps the wind from blowing the the burners out and makes for an even burn across the whole thing would you also want when you're uh starting this off is one of these this is like a creme brulee torch it's under 15 on amazon and other places but you want to make sure you have a nice strong flame to ignite these burners and you don't want to wait too long before igniting them because once you turn this on it's going to start filling this whole chamber especially if it's got the wind guard with gas and oxygen so once you once you light it if it's been filling for too long and you light it it's just going to blow some flame back at you and possibly pop this up so just uh once you turn on then light it right away so you don't want to be fiddling with matches or a cheap lighter use something solid to light it with and so besides using this for carrot beds as i mentioned it can be handy for stale bedding if you've got a nice feel that you're trying to steal bed you can still bed with one of these you can clear a couple inches of snow off of your parking lot and also clear your weeds out of your parking lot but it's also a great way to catch your parking lot on fire which i know from experience so be careful with it you are dealing with a lot of heat if you if i say catch some debris that's in the field on fire and keep walking you do have the risk of having that burn out of control behind you without even you noticing so just keep an eye on it it can be dangerous but as long as you use it safely it's a great tool to have okay so here's how you started first you open your your tank all the way and then once you've got your your torch handy in your hand you open up this safety valve here twist it backwards lift this up a little bit you can hear the torches ignite then if i squeeze the handle up top [Music] so what you do you assume that the carrots were planted in this maybe five or six days ago [Music] then when you're done you're switching rows you can it just stays on the pilot light right now so you can move it around and go to another row or if you're fully done what i do i turn it off at the tank and i allow all the gas to burn out of this of this tube so there's no more gas left in it otherwise you can some gas could be pressurized in here and you just don't want to have that risk so the goal of this is not to incinerate the weeds you just go over at a nice walking pace and you just super heat them so you're not cooking them you don't want them to char they will just wilt on their own and that will kill them so a lot of people make the mistake of going too slow and if you do you heat up the soil so much that you kill your weed or your uh your carrot seeds underground so just keep moving even if there are weeds left behind you it will kill them even though they don't look dead right away next i'm going to demonstrate how to use the wheel hoes and different hand tools to weed this this is a planting of radishes that was planted about three weeks ago and what's come up is purslane all around it uh there's there's no drip tape that i have to worry about hitting or snagging with the blades of these uh of these tools so it does make it go a lot faster we use overhead wobblers in the uh for our fall planting so we're not dealing with drip tape and yeah so once the irrigation is out of the way you can start using the tools and i'll show you how so here is the earthway wheel hoe with a stirrup blade on it and the real key is to set up your beds so that whatever you plant in there is wide enough that you can get this wide blade it's about eight or nine inches wide between the plants because if if if it's a narrow planting you'll end up hitting the plants and then it's just going to be a mess so you want it wide enough that you can run this right down the middle of your row again when i use a wheel hoe like this i usually go in between the two beds first and then do the outside it's just easier for me and the key is you're not going to be removing these weeds you're actually going to cut the roots out of it and just leave them on the surface sometimes purslane can can re re-root itself but usually it doesn't usually you weaken it enough that it's not a problem and so you just kind of lock your arms onto your sides and you just walk through and as i go it's just cutting the roots out without hurting these plants and you can just go at a normal walking pace whatever is comfortable for you sometimes if there's a if there's a stubborn weed you have to chop down into it and it's pretty easy to do since you're already upright but the ergonomics of this are very nice now i'm on the outside and you can see that this is just undercutting this purslane so it's cutting the roots off and then just laying it back on top it's not it's not stirring up the soil too much i am going back and forth a little bit where the soil is hard but see i just cut through a canada thistle just top that right there some pigweed all sorts of good weeds here and that's it so it doesn't take too much time here i am about to use a antique planet junior wheel hoe and it's got sweeps on the back of it and again this is probably about 100 or 120 years old but still works great and you just lock your arms and you walk down the road and it just rips this purse lane and the other weeds right out of the ground so it's just pulling the weeds out and if it's a dry enough day these a lot of these weeds just desiccate so now i'm going to demonstrate the high arch double wheel hoe from haas you do have to make sure that you plant it in a straight line and that you walk in a straight line and this has sweeps on both sides so i'm straddling this planting and it's just ripping up the weeds on both sides without disrupting this this plant [Music] got to make sure it looks like the the row bent a little bit there so you got to follow it carefully so you're not ripping your plants out as you can see it's just disrupting it's pulling out all this purslane and if it's a dry day a lot of that should dry up and die if it's about to rain though it might replant itself so just be careful about the weather but this works really well and you can go down into a bed very quickly so this is a long handled push hoe and what you do uh you've got your your bed here your two rows you just make sure this blade goes just a little bit under the soil and you just kind of walk and push it's popping out all the uh the purslane canada thistle just cutting it cutting it out right underneath the surface there's pigweed that it just knocked down it can go pretty fast with this there's a sometimes you have to go back and forth with the uh with the canada thistle but it usually cuts it right out so you'll see it cleans up the rose very nicely that's because it's got a nice long pointed blade and this sweep just cuts everything off and so it's a nice tool very easy to use this is a long handled stirrup hoe what you do uh you can either go forward or backwards i often like to go backwards and you're just scraping this blade back and forth along the surface it's cutting the roots out of these weeds you can there's a lot of control so you can get very close to the plant and you just kill in the weeds as you go backwards so you see it just cuts the uh cuts the plant off right below the soil and ideally and canada thistle will grow back but most of these weeds won't so that's the benefit of that so this is your traditional hoe chances are you have one in your shed or somewhere uh these are very common uh way back in the day and um honestly on a market farm you rarely use these uh what you'd use this for if you are to use it on our farm we use it mostly for mixing cement uh because we have the other hand tools but this is great for if you have established tall weeds so with this canada thistle uh usually sharpen this blade here and you just chop it off so if you got a few tall weeds you can go through see if we can do this this uh pigweed here and just chop it out with this tool but besides using a mower this is kind of your tool of last resort when you have tall weeds but you don't want to be bending over and pulling them out here's a tine weeder and so it's got all the really thin uh thin metal tines here on springs and this is what you use uh for carrots and other long rooted direct seeded crops okay so we got carrots down here and they're pretty well established so we i know there's a long tap root in there that's going to hold them in and the time reader just goes through and it doesn't pull the carrots up but it's killing off this purse lane and the other stuff and these these carrots even though they're knocked down a little bit they will pop back up but a lot of the other weeds these won't uh the drawback is if you've got a lot of debris in your field it's going to be pulling up rocks and roots and other things like that but it does work really well for care beds just you know if you can keep these things at a thread stage and just go through every few days uh you'll you'll get a lot of your weeds under control okay so the more precise you want to be in your weed management the smaller the tool and so just as the wheel hoes were large we're getting smaller and smaller to just two and three inch tools here and these things are great for things like head lettuce or salanova or spinach things that are planted very close together and what i have here is a collinear hoe i'll show you how to use this it's just a uh about a three and a half inch blade or so it's very sharp on one side and this is great for getting in between you want to move your drip tape because this will cut right through it it's just getting in between plants and because there are little weeds popping up here just killing them as they're popping up and so a wider tool wouldn't be able to get in in between these things so this is a great tool for getting in between tight spaces so next you'll have a hula hoe it's like a small stirrup hoe but just hand held again uh you are leaning over but like for example that that grass just pulled right out you just go through between the plants and rip the weeds out with one of these things lastly it's just a wire weeder so this is just one i made out of a landscape staple and some duct tape uh but you can buy them long handled ones short handled ones just a wire rounded wire that goes in and you just take your hand and you can scrape between the plants so if you've got a bed of salanova that's pretty densely packed or spinach one of these might be your best bet you just go through probably once until the canopy closes in and smothers the weeds so it is a lot of work you're bending over quite a bit but it works well now i'm going to show you how to make a little handheld tine weeder for probably less than five cents using a landscape staple and some gorilla tape so there are a lot of different landscape staples you could choose from and different options for you but you know these are about one inch wide by i don't know about six inches long or so and i'll walk you through how to do this so you get your your staple first do a uh maybe a two or three inch piece of tape and then just tape over the ends of this and again it doesn't have to be perfect you're just right now you're just holding this holding these two sides together and then get another longer piece of gorilla tape i like gorilla tape because it lasts several seasons out in the field and so i start a couple inches up just wrapping around just have it at a little bit of an angle so this winds its way up the tool and then just wraps around and then you just squeeze it all together and you've got a nice nice hand tool and to use it you just put your thumb on there and grab it and go down the lines weeding now another option you can do is if you have an old broom handle or something like that you just tape one of these to it and then you've got a long handled one so again you just take uh get your gorilla tape started figure out what depth you want yeah usually about two inches or so would be good and just hold it tight and wrap around just making sure that at the very end it's taped off well because that's where all the pressure is going to be and then just like that you have your own wire weeder tool for the cost of just a few cents

Channel: Cornell Cooperative Extension of Niagara County

Views: 9,785

Keywords: Beginning Farmer, Market Farm, Market Garden, Homesteading, Vegetables, Flowers, hand tools, wheel hoe, stirrup hoe, weeding, cultivating, flame weeder, organic

Id: XPOrg1_Tq24

Length: 27min 47sec (1667 seconds)

Published: Sat Jan 29 2022