Lee Loader

GasGuzzler wrote:When the snow is all melted and the ground dry (likely middle next week) I have a tiller lined up to borrow to mix in the rest of my dirt prep.

I'm going to need to buy a tiller and a leaf vacuum.

Buy an American or Japanese name brand rear tine tiller or nothing...unless it's an implement style for the tractor then I don't know. I have a leaf vacuum but probably not on the scale you need.

Get one of the old Troy built horse tillers. Mine is a 1983 and still going strong.

Got the tiller picked up and the plot plowed.

Here is the before with one pass of the tiller. I went in rows back and forth then up and down before manually raking the St. Augustine roots and runners out.



And after all tilling and raking.

Forgot to update but the seeds and onion slips were put in with a couple days of the above pic. Here we are seven or so weeks later and I have a big crop of the best radishes I've ever experienced. Not too hot, not woody, very crunchy and juicy. You can see the onions, lettuce, radishes, carrots, etc. in the background.

I decided I'm not going to "garden" on the new place despite having a deer-proof fenced garden. I really can't see farming 1/10 of an acre, I'm just not interested in it. Instead, I'm going to do what I enjoy doing, food plotting for whitetails. I have more deer here on the new place (p/acre) than I did on the ranch. I'm going to plant spring and fall food plots and let them grow. When the surrounding area is stressed, I will let them in the enclosure until the plants are stressed, and then I will close it up and get the growth back.

I have a leaf sweeper for my tractor, so I've been moving all the spent leaves from the yard area to the "food plot." Once I'm happy with the layer, I'm going to burn it. Once I get rain after the burn and the soil is at the right moisture level, I will till. I bought a 50" tiller from my Kubota 2650.

I'm not planning a Spring/Summer plot this year, too much other stuff going on. I will be ready for fall, though.

I could not live without a garden. Even when I was in an apartment In Montreal, I had 3 half whiskey barrels full of potting soil and planted 3 tomato plants in each. I bought a house 3 years latter and turned half the back yard into a garden. Then a year latter I bought a weekend place in upstate New York and made a one acre garden. I have not been without a large garden since then.

It's mostly volunteer tomatoes and the turnips we planted. The radishes are almost all out, the lettuce is out, the onions are out, and the carrots need pulled because they have mostly failed. It's been very wet here and not sunny so I expect 110 degrees and no rain from next week until Halloween.

...oh and lots of volunteer melon vines. Watermelon is pretty easy to tell but cucumber and cantaloupe look the same for most of the growing times until they get ready to fruit...same with other melon type veggies.