 Okay, my name is Poo Sprague, my wife Ann and I own Edgewater Farm here in Plainfield, New Hampshire. Our bent-on weeding is that we're trying to be somewhat bio-dynamic, trying to remove ourselves from the use of pesticides. It's not a religion with us. What we feel about land stewardship as a profitable farm is the most important thing. Cultivators are important to our regime, but if I have to use a chemical, I've got them on stock, they're part of the total program that we use. This is the Leely Weeder that we acquired last year. It cost us, I think, in a vicinity of 17 to 1800 bucks. We bought it at that time with the gauge wheels, which is an optional thing. I like it because it controls the height a little better. If you're in an area where your tractor makes a little dip, you don't have that action of digging in. The gauge wheel gives a little bit of regulation and flotation over the top of the crop. I use them also to adjust the tension of the springs. Just by lifting this up, I can get more action on top of the crop just by raising and lowering the gauge wheels. The normal way to adjust these is by moving this spring back and forth in this bracket. As you can see on this machine, that takes quite a while. We use the gauge wheels. As a matter of fact, we use gauge wheels on pretty much all of our three-point hitch cultivators. This is an updated version of an old Dearborn Weeder, which they use in the 30s. How it works is that these tines will vibrate as it goes over the crop. I use the Leely, specifically for drag off of potatoes up to certain growth stages on my leafy crops. When crops get a lot larger, spinach four to five inches high, I won't use it anymore. I also use it in conjunction with my baskets a lot of times. The baskets will churn up in between the rows and the action will break up the clods. It will also mulch around the plants that way. So I use it not only as a separate tool, but often in conjunction with another tool. Our soil is very sandy, so this in the land that is very sandy, this is well suited for shallow cultivation. And of course, we don't want to disturb much soil. One, either to turn up weeds or two to let any moisture out, especially on a year like this where it's so dry. So this is an ideal thing. You have to use it at least weekly. I'm pretty good about it, except during strawberry season, things get ahead of us. But if you use it weekly, you can get crops out without even having to go through in handhelds. So it's an important item on the smaller vegetables. This is a budding basket weeder that we use alone and in conjunction with the lily weeder. Our beds are 16 inches from wheel track center to wheel track center. All my tractors are set up that way. And I can seed three rows of spinach, radishes, what have you, at 17 inches apart. So these are set up to do pretty much all the crops as well. And as I can use this side dresser in conjunction with it to scuffle in, do the activity of the machine, I can scuffle in calcium, nitrate, whatever I want to put on. These are a little different than some, and you'll notice the wires here are at an angle. I used to have just flat straight wires across like that. But I put them on the edge because I put these angled wires on at the edge so I get a little more aggressive action on the edges of my bed. And I guess another thing to point out perhaps is that we use, I use one chain, I use a couple of chains on so that I get the driving action in the back. That rear set of baskets will, as you can see, turns a little faster than the front ones. This kind of dimples into the soil and roots out the plant. And that second line will come right behind and sort of kick it out, kick it out and sort of lays on top of the ground. So I understand that some growers will use these units without chains and run them over the top of the row, but right now I'm using it, set up like this, to kick weeds out, throw a little soil into the plant, and then by coming behind with a lily, I can also kick a little more soil and whatever, break up any clods or small clods that are on top of the soil surface. The track of speed that I use really depends upon the soil I'm in and how much soil I'm throwing around, how small the crop that I'm cultivating is. You're in beans and they're up pretty good. I'll clip along four to six miles an hour. Got out some newly transplanted lettuce and I want to go between it. I'm a little more tender with the joystick, I guess. This tractor, like the other Kubota, is an offset high-wheeled tractor and with it came this set of sweeps and shanks, or a full set of sweeps and shanks. We use this, we have a couple of discs we use for hilling. We use this to go after weeds when they get out of control in crops like beans. As you can see, here's a red root pigweed you can imagine. He was a pretty good sized beast. And these shovels are good at doing just that. They bury, they root out, they're very, very aggressive. Although we use them to cultivate the edges of our plastic. On the front here I have a half sweep, which is basically a sweep with one side cut right off and I can get right up close to the plastic. I can side dress it at the same time, the edges. And I can also throw dirt in with the rear sweeps back on top of the fertilizer all in one pass. So it's pretty versatile even though it's quite a chunk of iron. But when things get that bad, this is the kind of heavy artillery you really want to have. These can be set up in many different configurations by taking these off. And as I say, I may take this sweep off and put on a hillar and hill potatoes, getting the weeds farther out between the rows of potatoes. I used it in beans this morning, cultivating a crop of beans. I'll set this up differently with a side dresser on the other side and side dress and cultivate two rows of corn at a time. These shanks and sweeps are a little rough for doing the kind of work that we use the lily with and the budding baskets. But for your larger crops, pumpkins, vine crops, things on plastic, beans when they get up to a certain, after they get to about three or four inches, you can go in there and use this kind of tillage tool quite effectively. One of the things I like about the sweeps and shovels on doing beans or things you would have in a line on bare soil, whether it's peppers or if you're growing them on bare soil or small tomatoes, we grow our pumpkins and winter squash. One of those things that those sweeps do is they actually throw a little soil back on the plant and it's pretty well demonstrated in this situation. The outer sweeps will kick out, roll over pigweeds, stuff in the middle it will actually hill in and throw soil on top of the weed. Here's some crabgrass that is covered up with soil. It's going to restrict the growth of that plant. This crabgrass will come along, obviously, but it's going to be set back a great deal more than a bean. And anything that's smaller than that will obviously be smothered. So you not only get the action of destroying the weeds and cases, but also smothering new growth under the canopy of the plant, which I like. If you notice up front here, there's a half sweep, which means that it doesn't have, I don't know if you can get a shot of it, but it doesn't have this half of a cultivator at all. That's a very handy tool to get up close to plants. We also use that in cultivating the edges of our plastic. Our tomatoes, our peppers, our melons, squash, cucumbers, eggplant, is all on black plastic and when we put them out at transplant time, we cover them with hoops and remae. So at the time we take the remae off, we have an awful mess of crabgrass and broadleaves that's growing along the edge of the plastic and has also been nurtured in that environment along with a desired plant species. It also got a lot of weeds in there to deal with. When we first started farming for several years, that just meant an interminable amount of hand labor, of hand weeding. And with this particular, not the way the machine is set up here, but now we cultivate, we take the remae off and by taking these two chisels off, these two sweeps off, we move these half sweeps out, we reverse them so that the sweeps are out here just inside the tire tread. And we can go right down along those edges of the plastic, right underneath them just barely. Sometimes they'll even throw the dirt off to plastic, but what it'll do is any of the weeds growing in that area will be flipped out and rolled over almost in a plow-like fashion. And then behind, we have a set of duck feet cultivated that we put the pump point right on the center of the tire and that will come right along and throw soil right on top of the weeds. So we can really minimize the cultivating of the edges of the plastic, which is a great labor-saver for us. And as far as the middle of the row, we seed that down to a cover crop of clover, so we don't have to cultivate out there. When we were talking a few minutes ago about cultivating the edges of the plastic, here's an example of some plastic that was just recently cultivated. We pulled the remae off over a week ago and because it's strawberry season, we didn't get in here and cultivate immediately, which we should have. So yesterday I came in here and we were dealing with, you can see, some pretty large weeds here. And here again, despite the size and the thickness of the weeds on the edges, we were still able to, that front shoe was able to chisel these things out. We were able to throw calcium nitrate in at the edge and the rear sweep was able to come through and bury a lot of the weeds and cover a lot of the calcium nitrate in the edges of the plastic. And this is the end result.