The Accidental Smallholder Forum
Smallholding => Techniques and skills => Topic started by: marty5787 on September 14, 2015, 01:18:11 pm
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Hi everyone,
I am looking for a bit of advice! I am planning on turning 1/4 acre from one of our fields into a vegetable growing area. It is currently used for sheep but they are being moved elsewhere. My question is how best to turn it into something I can plant in. So far I have narrowed it down to the following:
a. hand dig (lot of back breaking work though)
b. use tractor and rotovator attachment
c. plough this autumn and disc harrow next spring.
I should add I do have a tractor but none of the attachments mentioned above, so I would have to buy/hire as necessary. If anyone has any ideas as to the best way, good experience or bad it would be much appreciated.
Cheers
Martin
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I'd plough then rotavate/disc depending on how it breaks up over winter. For a little area like that, you could try getting it ploughed for free - we managed that by getting a young lad who wanted practice for ploughing competitions with his mf35 and two furrow plough. Do you have a local ploughing society who might know someone in need of land to practice on?
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Check out Charles Dowding's videos on you tube about using deep mulch and no digging to turn a pasture into a productive veg patch. I always deep mulch and avoid digging whenever possible as I don't want to damage the soil. Digging breaks up the hyphae of the mychorrizal fungi that are so important to soils
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I am not an expert but I would say it depends on what sort of land you have. If you have your own tractor as long as it's light weight I would see about a rotovator as ploughing can break up your soil structure a bit too much and also harder to get hold of this time of year as they are probably in use. Also if you have a heavy tractor running over a small area you are more likely to compact your ground and make it water logged (more so if you are on clay I would say).
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Hi
Thanks for your answers, I like the idea of a no dig option but think I would struggle to get that amount of muck. I will also look into asking if someone needs practice ploughing I think the Welsh Championships are in a couple of weeks so will ask around if anyone needs the practice. Thanks again
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Make friends with your local agricultural engineer... it's he who sourced my 2-furrow and disc harrows for me although I do regret not just getting a pto rotorvator.
I alternate 2 1/4 acre patches... it'll be time now to spray down the fallow one and plough it for the winter next month. It also helps if a nearby farmer is planning on some muck-spreading and doesn't mind a quick detour to splatter your patch before ploughing.
My fallow patch for each year gets all the hen-house waste chucked on it, any woodchippings, woodburner ashes, sawdust etc thrown on it to join the ploughing in arther than bother with compost making. One year i got 14 tons of rotten horse muck donated (had to fetch it)... horse owners have an abudance.
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How are you getting on with the cultivation Marty ?
One thought has occurred to me .. If you can afford it perhaps hire a big beastie pedestrian controlled rotavator from Brandon hire , Speedy hire or Touts if your around or in the Ammanford area .
One of the bigger self propelled multyi geared ones that have a metre width of tilling and can eventually get down to almost 500 mm deep after several passes will take you about 10 hrs of solid graft to do your 1/4 of an acre.
As it's fairly dry at present there is no time as good as now to do it .