Contributed by: kellyseal on Wednesday, August 15 2012 @ 08:47 am
Last modified on
If you’re into outdoor activities and a more organic experience when it comes to meeting potential love interests, there’s a new concept that took place at a farm recently in Boise, Idaho called “weed dating.” Before you chuckle and roll your eyes, it’s not what you think. This is a speed dating event that involves doing work on a real farm – not a recreational activity. In fact, the hostess of the event herself claims she’s not an event planner or a matchmaker, but just a farmer.
Weed dating is a form of speed dating, except that instead of taking place in a bar or restaurant at night, it takes place on a farm under a sunny sky in the middle of the day. And instead of sitting across from each of your dates trying to come up with things to talk about, you are doing farm work beside each other – specifically, pulling nasty weeds out of the ground so that vegetable and fruit plants can grow properly. The hostess provides instruction to everyone – from how the rotation of couples works (the women stay put while the men rotate every three minutes) to how to discern the weeds from say, a zucchini or tomato plant.
While this is a pretty strange concept, it does provide a way for like-minded people to meet. Most of the participants have been outdoor enthusiasts, environmentalists, gardeners, and activists. While there are niche online dating sites that cater to these groups specifically, some prefer to meet in a more organic way that through an online dating site, so this provides another option.
As one participant stated in an interview with Associated Press, “What I find is if you go to bars, you don't really know what people's interests are. You can't really walk into a bar and complain about climate change or peak oil without having people look at you weird. That would probably scare off a lot of people.”
This wasn’t the first weed dating event – they’ve also taken place in Vermont, Michigan, Wisconsin, Illinois and Ohio. More than 40 participants showed up at the event this year in Boise, compared with only 20 last year.
I don’t expect this to become mainstream like online dating or even regular speed dating, because it’s really geared to certain types of individuals (and ones who live relatively close to farms), but I’m always intrigued by the new ways people develop opportunities to meet others. And if you’re open to trying something new, why not? It gets you outside, allows you to feel like you’ve accomplished or learned something, and there’s always a chance that someone interesting might show up.
To find out more about a popular online speed dating service you can read our SpeedDate review.