Of Furrows and Mud

As yet another storm system overtakes the area and our already saturated fields become wetter still, it’s hard not to fall into discussions about the weather. But I’ve had enough of weather talk for now so I’ll fall back on the subject that comes next most readily to mind—nerdy farm equipment talk.

This season we are taking the leap and making a change I’ve long been wanting to make–switching our vegetable beds from 64”, center to center, to 72”. This may not sound like a big deal at all–only 10 measly inches–but it actually is. Including the “lister bar” that we use to actually make the beds, there are no less than 10 different implements that we use at the 64” bed spacing that will all need to be changed. These include fertilizer spreaders, bed-shapers, planters, transplanters, cultivators, a propane flamer and others. To make the change on some of the implements it’s as simple as moving the skids that the implements ride on 5” out and re-clamping them to the toolbar they are mounted to. For other implements it’s much more involved. Wider tool bars will have to be made for some, bed shapers will have to be altered, and then there are the tractors themselves.  We have three tractors that we use as “furrow tractors”—meaning that they straddle the vegetable beds and safely ride over them. The width between tires will have to be changed to 72” on all three—which will take some doing. The largest of the three tractors weighs in at over 12,000lbs making it much too heavy for any jack that we own and necessitating a trip to the John Deere dealership in town.

When we are finished it should be a major improvement. For most of our vegetables we plant four rows, or “seedlines”, on each bed top. It’s a system that has worked well over the years, and the Italian transplanter that we bought four seasons ago does a beautiful job. But I have always felt that there wasn’t quite enough room between the outside rows of adjoining beds—that the plants there would often be left hanging on the bed shoulders where they didn’t grow as well because of tractor compaction and a lack of nutrients.

Changing to a 72” bed system should solve those problems–assuming the fields ever dry out enough for us to use it!