In organic farming, weeds that grow in the line of plants often can only be removed by hand, one way to make this task efficient is to use a bed weeder where the users are laying face down, hovering above the ground.

This makes the otherwise difficult task much more bearable, it also goes much faster and the ground isn’t trampled.

As I am going to grow relatively large quantities of vegetables this year, I wanted to be sure that with the limited amount of helpers we could get, that we would have a chance to stay in controll of weed populations. I also didn’t want to make anyone weed such surfaces entirely by hand and on foot.

This past winter I took the time to build two beds out of plywood, commercial models exist, but they are usually simple brancards with no head rest. The users can often be seen padding the beds themselves with cloths to avoid pain from the hard edges.

To test them I simply screwed them to a pallet which can be lifted by the tractor, but the goal would be to make a dedicated frame, or who knows a self propelled electric model. At this stage we have been using it for about 20-30 hours while planting leek, everybody seems happy with the shape, though I personally noticed that the top breast plate tends to push on the throat, which causes discomfort after some time. I will remove it or make the foam thinner.

You can download the current 3d model here in sketchup format here.