Tractor talk

We received two of our three implements yesterday -- a manure spreader and a set of disc harrows. Sorry, no pictures. There is a steady rain out this morning and I don't want to risk getting the camera all wet.

The guy who brought them down was a lot more subdued than his brother, who was the original guy I talked to on the phone. So the transaction wasn't that eventful. But they both had cool French Canadian accents because they are dairy farmers from Derby, Vermont, which is right up on the border.

The last implement we are waiting for is a chisel plow. (The link is just for background. Our plow is not as huge as the ones discussed there.)

Perhaps some background is in order. We have an area of one field that is in hay/sod, and we need to break up the sod, and create a level seed bed for vegetables. If you have ever tried to stick a shovel through a spot on your lawn, you can imagine how challenging this transition can be.

The first step is to use a two bottom moldboard plow to break up the sod. What the plow does is almost completely invert the sod by essentially flipping the top 5-8 inches of soil. Once this field is opened, we won't need the moldboard plow again for a while, so instead of getting one ourselves, we borrowed/rented a two bottom plow from our neighbor for a modest rate. I spent about 10 hours this week plowing an area that is about 80 feet by 1000 feet. (There are 45,000 sq. ft. to an acre, so we are talking about an area that is a little shy of 2 acres.)

The next step is run a disc harrow over the field to further break up the sod and begin to level things out. A disc basically tills the top 2-4 inches of soil. Since we will be needing a disc for a lot of things we will be doing, including light tillage and incorporating cover crops, we sprang for a set of our own.

Next, we spread compost or manure on the area, and then incorporate that into the soil. Since this is our first year, we have not developed a composting system of our own, so we are trucking in some compost from the extremely helpful folks at Vermont Compost. We will probably run the discs over the field a couple of more times to incorporate some of the compost.

After applying the compost, what we will probably do is use our chisel plow to both break up the subsoil and to further incorporate the compost. I also have a plan for fashioning a home made bed former on the back of the chisel plow, so that after the plow breaks up the soil, the soil is forced into a formed and level seed bed, ready for planting.

In theory, this all should work. But as with everything else around here, we don't have much experience, so we are learning as we go.

The only thing that is clear so far is that I am already forming an unnatural attachment to my, I mean, our tractor. Like I said, it took me 10 hours to flip the sod on a piece 80 feet by 100 feet. Do you know how long that would have taken me to do that with a shovel? A long, long time. But with tractor it was a relative breeze.