Keeping Rows Clean, Aerated And Fed With A Row Cultivator
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What is your Row Cultivator? A Mantis Tiller Cultivator or an old Multi Purpose Hoe?
We are all familiar with planting and sowing in rows. Whether it is in open wheat fields or rice terraces, or the vegetable plantings on a small holding, we see rows wherever we go. That, after all, is the efficient way famers have done things for thousands of years. Rows of seeds, and rows of plants followed by rows of crops. The vegetable garden for the ordinary homeowner is no different.
With efficient planning, even a small household vegetable garden can produce much as a year's vegetable needs for a small family. I can recall even as a 25 year old sowing and planting in rows on a small 15ft x20 ft vegetable garden that yielded enough carrots and onions to keep us for a year, plus courgettes and numerous other vegetables. All were neatly laid out in rows at the time of sowing or planting. Only then, I did all the cultivating with a traditional push hoe. Nowadays, a row cultivator is more likely to be used for speed and convenience, especially in larger vegetable gardens.
In the garden, a row cultivator is likely to be a push along type, rather than tractor-pulled type cultivator. You can usually find a tiller cultivator in your local hardware or garden store that you can use between rows of already growing vegetables or young plants. You need tines that are designed for shallow weeding and mixing fertilizer in the soil, rather than deep digging tines for initial soil cultivating prior to planting.
If you have something like a Mantis tiller cultivator, you can use the different settings for all the stages of the growing season. Tilling the soil prior to planting, and then using the same equipment on a different setting as a row cultivator and weeder, you can get all your soil preparation and maintenance done right through the season with the same equipment.
Or you can follow my example from the 1970’s and whip round the vegetable plot between the rows with a hoe. I did that for years, and remember a 70 year old neighbor looking on in awe as I harvested my first crop of super sized carrots, a crop he had never succeeded in growing.
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