Weed dating may cultivate love but farmers are the real winners

Can you meet your soulmate with dirt on your face? It’s a question that some people looking for love apparently consider.

I recently came across a story about an Australian farm that hosts an interesting take on speed dating — weed dating. In it, singles show up for an afternoon of weeding side-by-side with dating prospects, swapping weeding partners every 15 minutes.

Further research revealed that weed dating is nothing new, and started more than a decade ago in Idaho, New Hampshire or St. Louis, depending on who you believe. And apparently it’s popular enough to have made it halfway around the world to Melbourne.

In some ways I can see the appeal of weed dating. You can tell a lot about a person from seeing how they react to a job many deem to be unpleasant. Someone who’s not afraid to get a little dirt under their nails may also be more likely to be happy taking on other less-than-glamorous jobs.

One weed dating story mentioned a participant who was helping potential dating partners decifer weeds from plants, and I can’t help but wonder if this helped or hindered her dating prospects. On one hand, this could be indicative of a person with an interest and knowledge in a variety of topics, and who could be an excellent future gardener, if that was on someone’s dream partner wish list. On the other hand, I can see this crossing into know-it-all territory and being offputting, particularly for a person who didn’t show up for gardening experience.

Many of the stories pointed out a flaw in the drop-in dating activity —there was often a gender imbalance among the daters. One event had only one (clearly clued in) guy show up, and while it was open to people of all persuasions, many of the women were clearly disappointed.

I’m not sure weed dating is a great way to meet a future life partner, but if you were a gardener looking for a little help in the garden, you might strike gold at such an event.

Instead of spending that 15 minutes finding out what kind of conversationalist a person is, I’d be counting how many weeds they pull. I’d also be paying close attention to their technique. Did they dig out the entire root, or just break off the top growth? Did they get all the weeds in a given area or skip around from place to place, only grabbing the easy-to-spot ones?

If they quickly and cautiously dug out a weed with a big tap root and then held it up proudly and said, “Look at this! I got the whole root,” well that’s when you lock that gardening partner down immediately.

The real winners in weed dating are the farms that host these events and are smart enough to bring in a small army of people who willingly pull weeds for free.

Those farms, of course, provide a great service to people sick of dating apps. In the interest of helping people find their soulmate, I think I’ll host a weed dating event in my own garden next spring for a curated group of daters. They’ll have to prove that they can get the whole root out before they are invited.