Friday, June 2, 2017

Breaking Ground at Sweet Summer Farm

     After we purchased the tractor, we decided to try out the plow. This is the first large bed we have attempted to plow. We marked out a 20x60  foot bed on the side of the farm and decided to get started. We backed up the tractor and started to hook up the plow. The plow is the most interesting thing to connect to the tractor. The bottom pins on the plow are on two different levels making it a little more difficult to connect. First, you back the tractor up to the plow and try to connect the lower pin. Then, you raise the three point hitch up until it is level with the higher pin and connect the other side. Then you connect the top pin to the top bar on the hitch. After we spent a while connecting the plow we were ready to start plowing. We hopped on the tractor and drove it over to the field. We were ready. We drove forward and dropped the plow in. To our amazement, it went right in and began to turn the dirt over. We were ecstatic that it worked. As we continued to plow, we started taking pictures. Some of our pictures are down below. While we were plowing, we noticed all the rocks that were coming up with the dirt. We had never seen that many rocks in one place. Well, I guess we have but only in every other place we ever tried to dig in the ground at our farm! After we finished plowing it was a little rough, so we decided to re-plow it. This did smooth it out, but it was still too rough to plant. After some thinking, we decided to see if we could use the rototiller to break up the soil for planting. We spent some time out there, working on tilling and after about 2 hours of tilling (the field is big, the tiller is small) we decided it was tilled enough for planting. We are very happy about this achievement and can't wait to fill this bed with delicious vegetables. We are also looking forward to using the plow to cultivate some more large beds.