Tractor Country

We live in tractor country out here.  As far as I can tell, nearly everyone in our valley owns a tractor, and some people own two!  Most people use their tractors for mowing their fields, but our next door neighbor uses riding lawn mowers to mow his 4-5 acres and uses his tractor for digging and lifting heavy things.  

 Chad and I had thought about getting a tractor, but considering the smallest ones start at around $15k and that doesn't include implements, we decided to wait on that for a few years.  Still, our fields need mowed at least once a year.  As our neighbor up the hill says, some poor soul 150 years ago cleared out the trees with nothing but horses, and so he only feels it's right to keep it mowed.  I don't have anything against having more forests, but living here these past 10 months, we have seen how important a meadow is to certain kinds of birds.  We have watched Red Winged Black Birds, Eastern Blue Birds, Phoebes, Alder Flycatchers, Eastern Kingbirds, Barn Swallows, Tree Swallows, Thrashers, and of course Robins come and visit and make homes in our fields.  It's a wonderful feeling to make a home for so many birds and other critters.  So to keep it from turning back into forest, that means we need to mow it.  

 Thankfully, one of our neighbors has been mowing it for us this year.  

 Click on images to make them bigger.

 He finished the west field, and now he's working on the east field today.  Hopefully he can get it all finished today.  The grass has been too tall for us to get up to our trails in the east woods, so once he finishes mowing, we'll be able to get up there and hike again.

We still need something to mow brush though, so Chad and I decided to invest in an unconventional tool.  We bought what is called a two wheel tractor, sometimes called a walking tractor.  These are very popular in Europe because the farms are much smaller there than they are in America.  Actually, they were very popular in America back in the 1930s and 1940s, but after the war, farms got far too big for them to be practical.  

There is a very cool company in Kentucky that imports these European tractors, who help you find exactly what you need and will help you with using and maintaining your equipment.  The problem is that these are fairly big machines, and they normally get shipped to your house by freight truck.  Except our house is on essentially a dead end road, and there is no way a freight truck could get back out.  That meant we had to go to the shipping depot in our town and pick it up with our little trailer.

 

I forgot to get a picture until we had already started unloading, so imagine one more large box on top.  It was over 1000 pounds!  
 

 This is a brand called Grillo, and it's made in Italy.  These kinds of tractors are popular with market gardeners in America, folks who have 1 or 2 acre gardens where they grow produce to sell at farmer's markets, because it's small enough to move around the garden beds but powerful enough to do all of the heavy work a big garden demands.

 Like their big four wheel cousins, two wheel tractors use implements to get farm work done.  In the picture above with Chad, the tractor has a flail mower attached.  This is what we'll use for cutting brush around the property, and eventually we'll use it for maintaining our trails.  The first picture of the tractor above, sitting outside our garage, has the rotary plow attached.  It works perfectly for breaking new ground for a garden, and once the garden is made, it will build raised beds and also hill potatoes.  We also have a power harrow attachment, for making smooth seed beds in the garden.

The rotary plow got put through its paces this week.  Our veggie garden is going to be expanded to include a large berry patch.  I learned my lesson this spring, that it is better to prepare your garden beds the year before, especially if you have the coldest rainiest spring on record!  Right now, we are working the soil outside of the veggie garden, and in the fall we will take down the fence and put a new larger fence around the whole area.

 

 The tractor did such an amazing job breaking up the soil.  This soil has been a pasture for 150 years, so it's very compacted!  But just look at this soil, after one pass.

 

 

 My next step is to mix compost into the new garden bed, and then plant a cover crop of buckwheat.  Then in October, I'll turn in the buckwheat, some fall leaves from the woods, and some soil amendments, and build up the beds so they're all ready to be planted into next spring.

 

 On a totally different note, we bought a new-to-us couch last weekend.  There was an estate sale up the road from us, so of course we had to go.  Everyone on our road was there, mostly hanging out and chatting.  Everyone knew who I was and where we lived, and had gone to the estate sale that was in my house last year, and told me that our house is very nice.  Small towns are kind of charming that way.  

 

Anyway, I noticed a very cool grandma couch for a very reasonable price, so I snagged it!  We have had a really cheap futon in our living room, facing the wood stove, since we moved here.  It served its purpose last winter, as a place to sit and enjoy the fire, but I wanted something nicer there.  This couch is pretty old, probably 20+ years, but hardly used.  Plus it's a La-Z-boy couch, so it's very comfy!  

 

 Doesn't that look cozy?  Velvet sure thinks so.