Discing The Soil

Last summer my neighbor picked up an old disc from a friend of his who runs a junk yard. After using it on his garden he was kind enough to let me borrow it. That is Emily and Julia mugging with it above. The disc made short work of our vegetable garden up by the barn. All we need to do there is a final till of the soil and we will be ready to plant. The corn field however is a little more problematic since it had a thick covering of prairie grass. The plow did a fine job of turning over the grass but the disc is not chopping up the clumps of sod as much as I would like. I am contemplating borrowing a spike harrow to deal with the sod clumps, but I need to get the potatoes in the ground ASAP.

Plowing

I noticed on my commute to and from work that a lot of the farmers had turned over their fields in the last week or so. Taking this as my cue to do the same I looked into getting a plow.
Worried that my little 16 HP Massey Ferguson tractor might not be able to pull a plow, combined with the > $300 price tag for a new plow had me considering my options. Luckily I was able to borrow a single bottom plow from a neighbor down the road. After helping me hook it up, he gave me a crash course in plowing. "If it doesn't dig in shorten the top link, if it digs in but the top won't bury lengthen the top link".





I started out by plowing up the gardens we are putting in near the barn. We are in the process of fencing in the gardens to keep out the chickens, goats (that is Latte at right) and wandering deer. The fence made it a little more difficult since I couldn't take a straight run at it. After realizing that the tractor was not going to flip over even though it was severely tilted when its one set of tires is in the furrow all I had to do was learn some fine control on the plow depth. I was amazed by how well the little tractor pulled. I would loose traction and start to spin the tires before I lost power. After finishing the gardens I went out to the top of our pasture and plowed up a big plot for sweet corn, pumpkins, and potatoes. I was able to take nice long cuts and even the deep sod didn't cause too much problems.

Here is Sam in what will be the corn field. Hopefully next week I will be able to borrow a disc so that I can break up all the clods.