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Comment by pajtai | Hacker News Reader

This won't work! The hardest place to weed is in the grass and around strawberries.... both of these can be just as short as weeds, and from the "how it works" page, it looks like it is using height of plant to determine if it's a weed.

Got me excited for a second.

https://www.tertill.com/how-it-works/ "Tertill has a very simple method. Weeds are short, plants are tall."

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Yes, it only works for tall plants like tomatoes, raspberries etc., but that doesn't mean it "won't work".

It works on smaller plants, you just have to place the collar around them.

I guess I meant, it "won't work" for me personally... and using height as an indicator of weediness seems risky.... at some point you'll have a tiny new seedling that you want to keep and you'll have to remember to work around your weeder... just doesn't seem as convenient as I would imagine it in my ideal world.

If you only need to remove weeds manually in the first few weeks after seeding instead of all the time, that's a potentially substantial reduction of labor cost.

Same with strawberry picking robots: It's not a dealbreaker if they have only 50% precision. That still means you have halved your labor costs (and time requirements) for the picking step (assuming that the robot picks in the night, then workers pick the remainder during the day).

> at some point you'll have a tiny new seedling that you want to keep and you'll have to remember to work around your weeder.

There's a metal guard you put down around small plants that prevents Tertill from mowing them down. The video does a pretty good job explaining the basic operation.

Or just put chicken wire around areas you don't want weeded

I have thistles that if left untended will be even taller than tomatoes or raspberries...

Instead of weeding your grass, mix it with clover, which fertilizes and helps fill in spots where weeds might otherwise grow. Also, let some "weeds" grow. Monoculture lawns aren't great for nature.

Strawberries would be a worst-case for this design. The plants are low and spreading, and weeds tend to start under them and then pop up through -- so it's the tall plant that's bad and the short one that's not only wanted, but when the fruit are setting, very delicate. Little slanty robot wheels would make jam out of the berries.

Also, typically your rows of strawberries are long and separated by only a few inches, so the stakes, or croquet wickets they are selling wouldn't work. There wouldn't be room between the rows of wickets for the robot to move.

I have a similar problem. I plant a lot of cucumbers and cantaloupe. Any vine-like plant that grows along the ground isn't going to work with this. But, I plant tomatoes and peppers on the other end of the garden, so...

I live in a big city, so I can't experiment - but is it possible to put up some sort of raised horizontal platform for those types of plants? Once it gets big enough, raise it up, put it on the platform, and let it grow horizontally, but off the ground?

Or do cucumbers periodically put down roots like strawberry clutches do?

I think the biggest market for this is agriculture, not home gardening. Hopefully it can become better with time.

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