 My name is Chuck Armstrong, I live in Brownsville, Vermont and I grow about 30 acres of vegetables and cover crops. My main vegetable crops are sweet corn, green beans, winter squash and peas. I guess today we're talking about cultivation and I start off my season by chisel plowing and then I follow that up with harrowing and field cultivating with a perfect field cultivator. All the crops I plant are pretty large seeded and I can use a laly weeder on those and so after I plant I'll use a laly weeder before the plant comes up and also after. A good way to judge whether you need to laly weed is to just run your hands through the soil and if you see a lot of white thread seeds germinating it kind of looks like a sprout salad then you know you're ready to cultivate. When I'm using the machine on crops that haven't emerged yet I usually dig up a short section of row to see what the crop is doing, how far along it is, whether it's close to how close it is to coming through the surface and then I'll know how much pressure I want to put down on the tines and the way I adjust the tines is by raising and lowering the whole machine the lower you push it the more pressure you're going to have on the tines and as I start down the row I'll get them all in the ground and I'll put it down a little bit and if I feel like I'm starting to pull some crop up then I'll raise it a little bit and you know trying to keep it down hard enough that it's still pulling out the weeds. The other cultivation techniques I use are some Bezzarides weeders. I'll use the Bezzarides tools and there's a torsion weeder that you can get real close to the plant and it has a springing action so that it will bend away from the plant but it will still kill the weeds but it's less likely to kill the crop plant and it has a very minimal amount of healing so you can do it when the crop is very small and then there's another tool called a spring hull that's similar action but it gives a little bit more healing action so that's a little bit more aggressive so you can come through that on the second time through. This is a tool bar cultivator I use it on my corn beans in winter squash I try to use this as soon as I can after the crop is up and just big enough for me to get in there. These are called spiders and they're a Bezzarides tool and I've got them set up now so that they're taking soil away from the crop and you can reverse it so that you can heal up the crop and supposedly it's a little bit more or less aggressive according to which way you point these tines they have a little bit of a curve to them if you point them forward they're supposed to be a little bit more aggressive and I point them to take soil away from the crop when it's small so that the last tool that comes through which is this won't have very much soil that it pushes against the crop and it won't bury it and I can I've got this these I've got one on each side of the crop and they go just under the soil like that and it'll and I've got them so that the distance is only it's about three and a half inches apart and use it really similar to a shovel but it's a little bit more forgiving because it's doesn't have a sharp edge here so it's less likely to cut your crop and it will flex as it's in the soil will flex around a little bit so you can get a little bit closer than you probably could a regular sharp shovel and in between that that's what I have for the last two and in between I have some side knives and that's just to I'm finding if I just had this just had the spiders in the and these that there I was missing some spots so I just put that in there sort of clean it up and it sort of also levels back out whatever kind of a healing action that this tool makes