Drängen photos!

The much awaited photos of our new-to-us Drängen … to begin with, here is the Drängen just after Casey finished adjusting it for our purposes:

The much larger farm we purchased this from had it set up for four riders — many more than we need on our small farm! (And their strawberry-picking crews would run six such vehicles at a time.) Fortunately, the Drängen is flexible enough that we can set it up for our purposes too, as you can see here. The side arms are still twelve feet wide, wide enough to accommodate the additional three platforms, but we plan to cut them down soon to save on space. We’ll probably keep enough width that we can slide on two additional platforms in the future or a bin holding platform such as you see here (convenient for harvesting).

The Drängen in action! The first task we used it for: hand weeding an overgrown chard bed that survived the winter. In another year, we might have let this bed go, but this spring we’re eager to harvest everything we can while we wait for the weather to warm up. So, we engaged in what we call ‘guerrilla’ weeding as we ‘liberated’ the chard. This is never our favorite task, but at least Casey was more comfortable as he wrangled overgrown grasses and other early spring weeds like Groundsel and Persian Loose Leaf.

Another shot of the same task.

And, the resulting chard bed … not perfect, but at least these hardy chard plants now have more access to sun and water. I imagine we’ll get at least one or two harvests off of these before they bolt later this year. We hope so anyway!

We’d planned to post photos of the Drängen in transplanting action — the primary task we purchased it for. But Sunday’s planting session was too harried for photos. We simply kept forgetting the camera, which was almost a quarter of a mile to the north in our house. Next time.

For the farmers out there who might be interested in a Drängen type vehicle of their own, email Mats Andersson (the maker of the Drängen) at maproprojekt(at)telia.com, or check out the website of the Finnish maker, Elomestari, of a similar product called a ‘Crawler.’ Although we ended up buying a used Drängen, the Crawler also looks great. Each machine offers different features and are slightly different prices (which appear to reflect how sturdy they are). The Crawler looks better suited to low-impact market garden settings rather than big production oriented farms. Our use is probably actually closer to what the Crawler targets, but finding a used Drängen an hour’s drive from our house was a compelling selling point. After less than a week of Drängen-ownership, we’re very pleased with the back-saving potentials and recommend the concept of a prostrate self-propelled farming platform to any market gardener. (I wish I could think of a better short phrase to describe the concept, but there you have it: ‘prostrate self-propelled farming platform.’)

Happy farming!