Posts from — July 2008

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I’ve had several people ask what my secret was to hilling potatoes. Secret? No secret, just two disk hillers mounted on a tool bar and drive really fast. We hill our potatoes 3 times before they get too big to drive over the beds with our tractor. We could get one more pass if we had a high clearance tractor but that’s not going to happen anytime soon. It’s been great having the big disks to hill with. I purchased them from the folks at Market Farm in Pennsylvania. They’re basically one of the few full service implement dealers for small veggie equipment in the US. There’s a few others around but they seem to have the widest array of tools.

Click To Play

We bought a new rototiller this spring to run behind the higher horsepower Landini tractor. We bought a 64″ model that would till the wheel tracks as I was making beds. This would help reduce the weed pressure that always happens in the wheel tracks. (Before I just used a 4 foot model that would till the 4 foot bed but left the wheel tracks to grow weeds like crazy. We would then have to come back continuously with the walk behind BCS tiller- A real time killing project) I decided to try a row marking system that mounted right on the flap of the tiller, allowing the wheels to float with the terrain. Also because the wheel tracks are being tilled- the tire tread tracks being what I used to line up for the next beds- I added two extra marking wheels on the outside to mark the edge of the bed. All in all it works pretty well. There was some bending and adjusting of the marking wheel mounts to get the angle with the ground just right, but other than that it’s worked pretty well. Let me know if you have any comments or additions to this creation.