Let's Plough!

Remember Duckie in the film Pretty in Pink? He would say 'let's plough' - that is a movie from my early twenties - I've been trying to find a used copy to view once again for Nostalgia's sake. Molly Ringwald was in all the movies then. But I digress...
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Let's Plough the field

I suspect I'm going to lose most of you with this post - it's all about dirt and turning over said dirt. Truth is though, I had no idea how these huge farm implements worked and it's been quite the education.

Below is the used plough we purchase last week. The farmer who sold it to us suggested we wait until there has been rain so the ground is softer and this is what we did.  Hubbie has been researching about all this stuff online on a tractor owner's forum and at Everything Attachments.

This past Saturday he came into the house (he spends all his days working outdoors) and announced "Lynney I'm going to go plough the field now!"  So I dropped my sewing and grabbed the camera and off we went...

This attachment (plough) can be moved up and down and tilted to the left or right)

the pasture is in the back property just past the bee hives

The first go is a shallow scraping - the blades are lowered just so they dig into the ground and as you will see, they curl the cut and dug clumps of grass right-over so the grass is facing down.

Here we go, this is a series of photos as the plough does it's work.

One Row complete! You can surely imagine the grin on Hubbie's face. It was fun and easy!

we do not have agricultural tires on the tractor so it gets packed with mud and sometimes the tractor spins - to buy the tires would be very very expensive. 

To do the next row, the tractor tire must sit inside the 'furrow' of the first row that was ploughed. This means that Hubbie had to then adjust the tilt of the plough to make it level with the ground now that the tractor itself is on a tilt. There's a handle that he turns to the left or right and this tilts the plough to the left or right...

The second row...

Now that the plough has been adjusted to be level with the ground, the second row is ploughed

 Hubbie then headed for the other side of the field and began a new row at that end but...

He paused mid-row to look at his work and then said " *bleep!* I am going in the wrong direction! "

You see, the plough curls the soil  so it flips over and each row must be 'flipped-over' in the same direction. 

Giggle...I left him to it after that, I had dogs to feed and a First Egg to find not long after...It was a good day.

Soon, we'll get a used part (the farmer said we get $50.00 off on our next attachment purchase) to disc the field. To disc is to break-up the globs of soil. This must be done several times - twice in the fall and once in the spring. We need to rent a trailer to get this newest used attachment - it's too big for our little pickup truck. Stay tuned for some exciting disc'ing' ! 

So what are we going to plant in all that soil? 

We are still figuring it all out. We will be doing a lot of reading this winter.

And we are definitely going to need a root cellar.