Five New Tools For Market Gardening

By Jean-Martin Fortier

Over the last three years, I’ve been involved with a new experimental farm in my province of Quebec. At my farm, La Ferme de Quatre Temps, I was asked to design and create a training farm where some of the strategies described in my book The Market Gardener could be expanded upon and scaled up. A big part of the mission was to find ways to increase efficiency for the small-scale market garden. Here is a list of five new tools that have changed the way I farm.

Bio-Discs from Terrateck
Terrateck is a French company that has been developing awesome market gardening tools that I’ve been trialing for a couple of years now. Although the tools are expensive, I’m a big fan of the quality and usefulness of most of the products they develop. It’s definitely worth checking them out.

Number one on my list is their double-wheel hoe mounted with the Bio-Discs. It’s an ergonomically designed wheel hoe developed to straddle the crop, and it comes with a clever tool bar system that allows you to easily change different cultivating attachments. I’ve tried all of them (the full range is available on the Johnny’s Seeds website), but the one I like the most is the Bio-Disc.

 

The disc will mound up roughly two inches of soil on both sides of a planted row, cultivating two rows in one pass, while also burying small weeds that might have emerged on the row. The capacity to cultivate both between and on the rows in one quick pass speeds up our cultivating chores immensely: what used to be done with stirrup hoes, now gets done ten times faster.

The Bio-Disc comes with two straight discs that help both to manage the depth at which the curved discs work and to advance in a straight line. This feature works well on sandy soil. If you’re working with stony or clay soils, I recommend removing the straight discs, as they are more cumbersome than useful in these conditions. For carrots, beets and other closely spaced crops (four to six rows on a 30-inch bed), this tool works very well, but you need to cultivate early - from the first appearing leaves up to two inches. The Bio-Disc can also be used for hilling more mature crops like beans, onions, and leeks, which can be covered with soil once they’ve reached five inches.

One possible option to consider is adding the finger weeder attachment to the strategy, using the weeder to break up the previously mounded soil. You do this five to ten days after your initial pass with the Bio-Disc, when new emerging weeds have started to sprout on your hilled rows. The finger weeders break up the soil, leaving no chance for broadleaf weeds to establish themselves. We’ve just started to play around with such strategies, which mimic what mechanized growers do with a cultivating tractor. Having a customizable toolbar that offers such a range of possibilities for the market gardener makes this new tool a unique and valuable one.

Flex-tine weeder
Another game changer on the farm has been a neat 30-inch tine weeder made by Two Bad Cats, a small Vermont company that makes market gardening tools. This is a handheld version of the tine weeder that mechanized growers happily use in their fields. The tool consists of a light frame made out of two rows of staggered tines lined up at one and a half inches apart.

When pulled, the spring tines vibrate their way through the upper layer of the soil, scratching the surface and destroying the small emerging weeds but bouncing away from sturdier more established crops. Young seedlings that are well rooted will survive the hit from the tines, but the smaller weeds won’t - it’s that simple. The tool covers an entire 30-inch bed in one pass, which makes it extremely flexible for a variety of row crops, regardless of the spacing.

 

I mostly rely on the tine weeder for densely seeded crops such as arugula, radishes, turnips and other greens that are spaced at six to twelve rows on 30-inch beds. These are crops that are normally either impossible to cultivate or require a lot of time to weed effectively. For all of the crops above, two quick passes at the right moment will considerably diminish the weed presence. It doesn’t eliminate them all, but it brings down the pressure a great deal.

In my experience, the tine weeder can be used in clay or sandy soils for as long as weeds are in the white-thread or cotyledon stage. Once weeds have rooted, the tool becomes relatively ineffective. To make sure we use it at the right time, we’ve adjusted our seeding schedule, marking our calendar to systematically use the tool one week after transplanting, and two weeks after direct seeded crops. To enhance the results further, we make another pass (or two) the following week. This process also helps to disturb any hard surface crust that might develop on the soil, improving surface drainage - another favorable outcome. All and all, we use it about one hour a week in the garden, but it certainly saves four to five hours, making it number two on my list.