Portage River Farm

Over the past few days, I have been using the tractor to get a few more tasks completed. The driveway has been plagued with potholes since before we bought the farm. With the warm spring rains those potholes became huge and filled with water. I felt embarrassed any time somebody came to visit as they slowly bounced and jostled their way up to the house.

When things were particularly desperate, the children and I spent a couple of afternoons loading the wheelbarrow with small rocks and attempting to fill the holes. Our efforts resulted in small improvements but most of the rocks we deposited ended up getting shifted to the sides as our car tires worked their way back down into the muddy mess.

This problem was on our mind when we went tractor shopping. We wanted to be sure to purchase something to help us restore and maintain the driveway. In the end we bought a 6' box blade (fourth photo down).

The box blade has six adjustable teeth that loosen up the gravel as it is pulled along. The loosened gravel accumulates in the box and is graded smooth by the blade on the lower back edge of the box. I made about a half-dozen passes up and down the drive with this implement and it left the drive smooth and the previously packed-down gravel loose and soft.

The second task for the tractor was getting the garden soil ready for planting. I had already plowed it up a few days ago but unfortunately left a few grassy patches. I decided that I would have to turn it a second time to be sure that we wouldn't be attempting to plant portions of the garden in sod and then spending all summer searching through tall grass to find our crops.

The surface of the garden was still very rough from the large furrows the plow had left. Before plowing a second time, I decided to use the disc harrow to cut up the large chunks and smooth it back out. After backing the tractor up to the disc, I found that it was equipped with the wrong size of draw pins to mate up with the lower arms of the three-point hitch. I ran out to Tractor Supply and bought smaller pins, removed the old rusty ones with a grinder and installed shiny new pins.

The disc harrow (two pictures below the box blade) made quick work of reducing the clods. Then I hooked up the plow set again and turned the entire garden once more. The second try at plowing was so much easier. By the end I really felt that I had gotten the hang of it and the resulting garden was uniformly turned.

I finished up the task by passing the disc set back over the whole area and then dragging the spring-tooth harrow (pictured below the disc harrow) across the soil to smooth the final high spots down. The soil is now fully broken up and very soft. I will have to do a bit of raking to remove small clumps of broken up sod that are still on the surface but otherwise it is ready for seeding.

Nevermind the fact that this task should have been done long ago, I'm still having fun and have decided that we are just going to do the best that we can for this first year. As long as each year brings some improvement over the last, I'll consider myself successful. As things are going, I'm ensuring myself many years of satisfaction by leaving lots of room for improvement!