Wednesday, December 3, 2008

Breaking Ground


We're working on opening up a new quarter acre plot for vegetable production next year. In the middle (between the two strips of black garden cloth) is a mulched bed of garlic. We planted the garlic in late October for next summer's harvest.

This shot shows the results of one pass with the rotary plow. It does a pretty good job of breaking up the sod, but we'll need to do at least another pass with the tiller attachment to get a workable seed bed. The wavy course of the furrow is due to the rock in the soil that makes the tractor and plow jump around some. After each pass I go back and pull out all the rock I find.

Here's a shot of the pile of smaller rocks that we've recovered thus far: