[AT] Cultivating potatoes

[Bob Seith]

All this discussion about different types of cultivators has reminded me 
how fussy we were about cultivating potatoes back home. Hilling potatoes 
was certainly one operation, but by no means the only one. Lots of other 
work was done throughout the season.

We had a tiny homemade rotary cultivator that fit in the front gangs of 
the Farmall A. It had only three spiked wheels that sort of resembled 
small versions of these:

http://www.ent.iastate.edu/Imagegal/misc/rotaryhoe.html

It was used to break the crust if you got heavy rains after planting and 
before emergence. Ran it right down the middle of the row, obviously 
held so as to go rather shallow. Go too deep, and you'd throw the 
potatoes right out of the ground.

After emergence, there was a "potato weeder" that started life as a 
piece of horse-drawn equipment but eventually moved over to a 
three-point hitch mount. Again, you had to be careful using it, but it 
would tease out a lot of weeds.

Most actual hilling was done with disk blades mounted in the front 
cultivator gangs. But later in the season, just before the vines died 
down and made further cultivating impossible, we ran through the fields 
one last time with only rear cultivators mounted. These looked like 
miniature middlebuster plows -- maybe 10 inches wide -- and would make 
the old Farmall boil on a hot day. But they threw a lot of sandy loam 
around!

Best,
Bob Seith
1953 Farmall Cub