Our beautiful orange Allis Chambers has finally been put to work. What a wonderful, wonderful machine. Casey tinkered with it all day yesterday, trying to get the blades positioned correctly for our bed spacing. It was a bit of a trial, really—trying and retrying to get it right. The blades are so powerful that we could very easily take out baby plants along with weeds!
And today his patience finally paid off. We haven’t quite gotten it all worked out yet—we still need to weld a cross piece for the front of the weeder bar in order to mount the an addition shovel for the middle of our four row beds (we’re not using the spider yet, by the way—we’re sticking with the original Allis materials for now). But—but—here’s the miracle: today, Casey weeded six 130 foot beds in less than 35 minutes. And this was the practice round, when he was still going pretty slow. Plus, he had to wheel hoe the middle row since we still need to get that blade mounted, as I already mentioned. But even with the wheel hoeing: 35 minutes total. Really, folks—this is like organic magic.
Of course, it’s not a perfect weed job. It’s a rough cultivation, about equivalent to a wheel hoe. We’ll probably still go through and cross hoe once per planting. But it takes, gosh, a fraction of the time of wheel hoeing, and the ground is now cultivated which will make cross hoeing much easier as well.
Since the Allis is the first farm purchase we made, we were really hoping that it would deliver as promised. Since so many farms rely on the Allis, we figured it’d be a safe investment, but you never know (we’ve certainly made some purchasing mistakes already—the Haygrove!). But it really has exceeded our expectations so far. We know that it’s not going to be simple, and we still need to work with our method and equipment, but it’s a good thing. We’ll post photos of the Allis in action soon, along with more photos of the fields.
