Translations:Benutzer:Arian/Klett-Mini-Test/951/en

In sugar and fodder beet cultivation and in field vegetable growing, refined mechanical methods are available — alongside pre-emergence flame weeding — that leave only an extremely narrow band along the drill rows untouched. Despite all good preparatory work, however, a residual hand-weeding is unavoidable. This work belongs to the few tasks still left to the farmer and gardener in which he can enter into direct relationship with soil and plants in a twofold sense: on the one side, he is laboriously and hands-on given over to an activity that goes all the more easily and swiftly the more one sets oneself aside and turns with a testing gaze toward the plants that are to be freed, so that they may unfold unhindered to the full formation of the fruit. This turning-toward works in two ways: it is purposeful — and toward that alone is the machine directed — and, polar to this, it awakens in the spirit an interest and in the soul an effective relationship with regard to the intimacy of the living context of plant and soil. One becomes aware of the challenge not to fall into the emptiness of mere routine, which makes the work a burden. Weeding can be, alongside other such activities, a field of practice that, bridge-building, awakens a moral sense toward the things and beings of nature. On the other side, contemplative thinking rests over the happening. One observes a wealth of phenomena — for instance, how the most varied herb species associate themselves with the one crop one is cultivating, how these are differently formed in root, leaf, and blossom and, in their earthly image, give tidings of the archetypal image that lives in its essential being in the supersensible. One identifies the weed or weed grass as belonging to a particular genus and family, and becomes aware how many of them carry a significant healing efficacy. One recognises how this healing efficacy is closely related to the nourishing efficacy of the fruit of the cultivated plant as it gradually develops. For the sake of this nourishing efficacy, the "stand of medicinal herbs" must yield to a certain degree. This holds especially for the root crops, which fruit more in the vegetative realm. Thus falls to the root-crop field, within the crop rotation, the function of serving as a cleansing field for the following crop — usually a cereal. At the same time it is the one that makes the greatest demands upon soil fertility.