[AT] Cultivating potatoes

[Ronald L. Cook]

Bob,
	What part of the country are you talking about?
Ron Cook
Salix, IA

Bob Seith wrote:

> 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

>