Horticulture & market gardens

A market garden is worked in narrow beds, over and over, and a good deal of that work happens under cover. That is where mechanisation usually stops: a combustion engine run inside a polytunnel fills it with exhaust long before the job is finished, so the tunnels get done by hand while the machine sits outside.

An electric machine has no exhaust to get rid of, so the constraint disappears. The AFT-e1 is 0.75 m wide at the handlebars on a 0.68 m track, which is a bed width rather than a field width — at Meanwood Valley Urban Farm in Leeds the market garden runs a hundred and ten beds, every one of them 75 cm, and the tooling drops straight in with no change to a layout the garden already runs.

The tools are the ordinary ones. A rotavator to burst sod and work the same ground down to a seedbed, a power ridger to form beds and cut the ditches between them, a rear tine cultivator for weeding between planted rows, and a trailer for the compost and the crates — which on most of the sites we visit is the job that actually eats the week.