Great weeding tools

[IMG Credit]

For any gardener or farmer, weeding is a serious pain the you know what! It just keeps coming back, and the struggle can be a real deal breaker as far as motivation goes.
I mean, you're there to grow food/flowers, and not spend time controlling those darn pests all the time.

So as a person that had no inclination to spend days doing things I don't like, and reaching the age where working on your haunches all day will just make you dead tired, I looked into tools that would not break the bank, and how they may help me in weeding the garden and fields.

As you may know, most commercial farmers have a couple of methods of weed control:

1. Labour. People who come in and take care of the work for you (expensive)
2. Poison cocktails. Not something you want to glibly throw around if it's food you're growing, and you want it to be good for you and others
3. Mulch. Natural way of stopping the weeds from getting the needed light (takes a lot of effort and mulch to get larger fields covered)
4. Plastic sheets. Can work well, but can be expensive as well. Not as easy as you may think, and finding pegs to hold the sheets down was harder than I thought
5. Basic tools like in the video

We have around a hectare of land where we are growing vegetables, and after using the tarpaulin initially to kill the main set of weeds seeds, we now control the rest with these tools in the video. It works like a bomb to be honest. Quite easy, and a single person can do a large bed of around 40m x 12m in around 2 hours. Doing that weekly would be simple enough and not allow the weeds to propagate...they die off before they become more.

So the 2 tools in question are the Stirrup hoe and the Push Pull hoe.
Both work wonderfully, and in essence do the same thing. They work just under the surface and cut the weeds about an inch under the ground.
The PP (Push Pull hoe) hoe works really well for larger plants, and for your initial weeding. It even gets rid of hardy heavy weeds like river grass.

The Stirrup hoe will not work on heavier weeds, but once the heavy work is done is perfect for the maintenance of that ground with very little effort at all.

All the cut weeds then become mulch or compost, or can be raked up and thrown away.

Below is a picture of 3 sections of field.
One section has the plastic covering still on, which is left on for around 3 months, thus killing all the weeds under it.
The closest field is the one where the cover was just removed....you can see how effective that is.
The far field is the one that was weeded using the tools in question.

Excuse the video, it was done for my mother, and was displaying the tools that we made in our own personal garden on the farm.

I know you can buy them in Canada and the USA, but they are quite pricy from the manufacturers ($75). Here I made them for a fraction of that cost.

Cheers