[AT] Am I crazy?

[Greg Hass]

I will try to take a shot at how the weed controllers work.

First of all,  they only replace the front tooth of a cultivator.  You 
still need the rest of the teeth to clean out the centers.  When mounted on 
the tractor cultivator, one shank goes on each side of the row.  When 
mounted upright in the cultivator  you essentially have 2 miniature grader 
blades on each side of the row of crop.  The front blade is about 3" x 6", 
the back blade a little shorter.  They do not lay flat and slice under the 
soil like a normal cultivator tooth.  The front blade is set to go about 1" 
deep, and (like a grader blade) set on an angle.  It pushes the top inch of 
soil away from the plant, leveling the ground and pushing any weeds and 
clods of dirt 4" away from the row.  The front blades are set to go as 
close to the row as possible without catching the plants.

The back two blades are also set at an angle, and 1-1/2" or so deeper than 
the front 2 blades.  (Remember, you've got a set of blades on each side of 
the row.)   The back blades are shorter because you don't want to grab the 
weeds and clods that the front set pushed away from the plant.  The back 
blades are then like 2 short grader blades grading the freshly exposed dirt 
toward the plant, and it rolls the dirt up against the plant under the 
leaves with less danger of covering them than with a regular cultivator 
(which more or less throws the dirt toward the plant).  This is why they 
work so well on crops like edible beans in our area, because it more or 
less grades the dirt under the leaves and covers the weeds without covering 
as many beans.  This is also the reason why they do not work in hard 
ground.  Because they are just shoving the soil one way or another, they 
have no actual tooth to dig into the ground.  Hope this helps to make it 
clear and not confuse the issue even more.

In theory, they maybe could be used to hill potatoes, but they would have 
to be adjusted so the front blade did nothing and only the rear blade moved 
dirt.  But because the rear blades are so small, you would at most be able 
to move 10% of the dirt necessary to hill potatoes.

Greg Hass
 From the tip of Michigan's Thumb