 
fall and winter are probably my favorite
times of the year to be out in the
garden the temperature is much nicer the
weed pressure is greatly reduced and
it's just a nice time to be in the
garden today I want to show you how we
weed our plants in our fall garden
particularly our carrots and our onions
so here we've got five rows of carrots
planted purple red yellow and two
variety
two rows of orange and the way we plant
our carrots is we plant them on double
rows or twin rows with a row drip tape
in the middle here so we bury this drip
tape in the middle and we plant our
carrots on both sides of that drip tape
there now there's two different
strategies that play with this technique
here the first one is we maximize the
utility of this drip tape so for one
line of tape we get two rows of produce
the second strategy is is that once
these carrots get up a little bigger
they're going to shade out this middle
area right here between the twin row and
we don't really have to worry about any
weed pressure because the foliage is
going to cover that up and shade that
out so there's two main tools that I
want to tell you about today that we use
for weeding these fall and winter crops
particularly these carrots and onions
the first one here is our single wheel
hoe now our double wheel hoe has several
advantages over the single in that you
can straddle rows and things like that a
little more versatility with the
attachments however in some situations
the single has an advantage over the
double because it has a smaller
footprint and because these middles
between these double rows here are
fairly narrow we need our single here
instead of our double because the double
if we used it the wheels will be kind of
almost running over our carrots here so
we need this narrow footprint and we
have our three cultivator teeth on here
and this is what
use to weed and cultivate shallow these
middles between these double rows
so our single wheel hoe makes quick work
of weeding those middles between the
double rows and now I want to show you
the tool we use to weed on top of the
beds in between those individual rows
now this tool right here when we moved
in the house we live in now which was my
wife's grandfather's old place I was
cleaning out the barn and I found this
tool right here and I used it on some of
my onions and carrots that year and I
was thought man this I've never seen a
tool really like this with this kind of
angle in that small of a cultivating
head I really like this thing and this
one is kind of hung on an old tobacco
stick it's kind of short so I got in
touch with a guy that I know in Missouri
that makes some other tool heads for us
and I said hey can you make me one of
these so I could put it on a longer
handle and he hand forges these right
here
sharpens them and then we hang them on a
nice little hardwood handle here we
call it a single tine cultivator and
it's really become one of my new
favorite tools to use in the garden I
want to show you here how we use it on
these double row carrots so this this
single time cultivator is pretty
versatile you can use it in two
different ways you can stab straight at
the ground like this you want to break
up something or the way I like to use it
is to turn it sideways kind of drag it
across the area like this and it really
lets me get into close tight spaces with
this narrow little cultivating head here
so when we read our carrots what we do
is we just turn it on its side like this
right here
we just come in here and just scratch
the surface of the soil in between these
carrot rows
so because we've got that drip tape
buried about three inches of the soil we
can skim the surface with this single
time cultivator and we don't have to
worry about nicking our drip tape or the
drip tape being in the way it really
works well with these double rows so
there you go we've got two simple tools
here that make it really easy to keep
the weeds out of your fall and winter
gardens a lot of people ask us why we
don't mulch our gardens and it's just
not very time efficient for us this
right here with the wheel hoe and this
on this five rows of carrots here takes
less than 10 minutes and I do this once
a week and I basically have no weed
pressure at all so so for us that's the
most quickest and efficient way to keep
the weeds down in our garden