Farming In Mud

Consumers of Agricultural Products,

I may have mentioned my intention to install a large new garden bed I have been preparing at our rural homestead. Yesterday we had a nice extended lunch with my Uncle Don, who is 96, and his lady-love, Dagmar, who was a little German girl in WW-2 and its aftermath.

As rains were expected in the evening, we hurried to Yoakum to get final bed prep and planting done before the garden bed became mud.

I had already roto-tilled this bed 3 times, which is fairly rough work, as roto-tillers buck up and down a lot and need the tines cleaned after each minute of use in this clay soil with deep grass roots.

When we arrived in Yoakum a little after 5 PM I thoroughly raked the bed for dry grass to throw out, and to even the low spots, intending to further roto-till 8 rows and use my brand new seeder to plant purple-hull black-eyed peas, a variety which tends to grow upright for a one-time machine harvest at about 4 months. My intention is to have Wrens Abruzzi rye in the bed the non-summer 8 months of the year, a simple 2 crop rotation which whould help build the soil.

This is a novel project for me. I don’t know of anybody doing it.

Theoretically, it is feasible, but the devil is always in the details.

The roto-tiller cannot eliminate all of the deeply established grass roots, something people used to know, originating the term “grass roots”, which now lacks a clear meaning.

I can foresee a lot of ongoing difficulty as I will need to keep cutting down crops with live roots and planting the next crop into the established roots, while chopping the plants down in place as mulch, to eventually integrate into the soil.

Yesterday evening, right as I finished raking, it started to rain lightly, but I still needed to run the roto-tiller down 8 rows and plant them, so I kept going, because I wanted to roto-till before the bed turned to mud. It did get superficially muddy, and my flip-flops got so much mud on the bottems that I had to go barefoot. There were no sharp things, so I could. I roto-tilled the 8 rows, spacing them across the 24 ft. of bed width in the 34 ft long bed.

I had never used the seeder before, but had spent a couple of hours reading negative reviews on various seed-planting devices, and this one was the least-bad choice without doubling or tripling the price.

The front wheel rotates, and a belt commects the wheel-pulley to a pulley that rotates a collector-plate (8 disserent sizes), which scoops a seed in each litte cutout and transfers it to a tube tat drops it into a little furrow it digs. Then a little metal spade pushes the soil closed over it, as one proceeds, pushing downward and forward.

You can see that this would not work into established grass roots, and might clog up in mud. It would also not work in hardpan soil. It did not work at first in my superficially muddy tilled-rows, so I had to adjust the belt tension with a wrench and pliars, then the seeder-wheel rotated properly. the light rain continued, and the mud progressively covered the wheels.

There was a tendency for a mud plug to collect seeds down at the bottom of the seed-dropper tube, so I removed it at the end of each row, having a mud blob with seeds in-hand, which I walked up a row to distribute, or threw pieces of. The mud was getting muddier.

I finished all of my passes with the seeder, and had to get a bunch of seed out of the bin by hand. The seeder fell over and spilled out the last seeds twice, so I walked up and down some rows seed-dropping by hand, noticing that a lot of the seeds were just on the surface, and pushing them into the mud with my feet as I proceeded. This became the final-step of the planting routine as I carefully trod each row twice, squishing visible seeds into mud with my feet until I did not see any more seeds on the surface.

I had to do a lot of cleaning up of myself and the seeder with a hose after that. I left the seeder in a covered workspace.

Our rain guage showed 1/16” of rain, but it has rained a lot in recent weeks, so the soil had ladequate moisture at the start. this morning the guage showed 3/8”, indicating further and substantial rain overnight. With fresh coffee in hand I went to examine the patch. Many seeds hadbeen superficiallyrevealed by the rain, and were partly visible in the mud. We expect rains fairly often for the next week or 2, and I decided not to push them in with my feet again this morning.

We will see how the birds and critters do with this new food source...

Barefoot Agronomist