Let’s first dispense with the obvious: Weed dating is not what it sounds like. Rather, think rows of vegetable beds. A line of women and men in overalls, trowels at the ready. Cringe-worthy puns about "getting you into the beds," and if all goes well, a little romance. What better way to "weed out" a potential mate?

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Ok, so puns are hard to avoid, especially considering that weed dating is a play on "speed dating." But weed dating works much the same. During the quirky get-to-know-you events, gardeners tend to a vegetable bed and get to know each other for a set amount of time before moving on to dig in the dirt alongside a new partner, according to Modern Farmer. Farms that host the events often teach weed daters about the plants they’re tending and offer up a little home brew to cut the edge, according to The Huffington Post. As EarthDance, an organic farm school in metro St. Louis explains on its website, "you can tell a lot about a person by the way they weed."

Weed dating first appeared at a Northeast Organic Farming Association event in Vermont in 2010 and has since taken off across the planet. The goal of weed dating depends on the event: Along with creating love connections, sometimes the meetups are platonic, sometimes they’re fundraisers and sometimes they’re community-wide events, but they all are rooted in the same concept.

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"We're doing it to help people meet other like-minded people who are interested in sustainable agriculture for both friendship and dating," Magdalena Casper-Shipp of Illinois'The Land Connection told the News Gazette.

The events seem like a fertile business model for farms: Farmers get a few hours of free labor and generate revenue through ticket sales. But like dating, weeding is a tricky business. Farms who host the events have to make sure to steer weed daters away from delicate crops and even with the most robust of crops, weed daters are definitely not concentrating exclusively on the task at hand.

“To some extent the free weeding was helpful, but we could have done it more quickly ourselves,” Molly Rockamann from EarthDance Farm in St. Louis told Modern Farmer. “Given the amount of time that’s actually spent promoting the event, it would be faster to spend that time weeding instead.”

Still, the possibility of a love connection makes the events appealing to singles, who see a night out on a farm as a different way to find someone that they dig.

"The typical speed dating, it's just kind of awkward," Brian Cox told The Huffington Post. "But this is just beautiful, because it's like outside, it's very organic. Literally."

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