My first week of tractor ownership

[Birdbrain]

Hello All,
My new tractor was delivered on Tuesday around 5 PM. It is a Kubota L3400 HST. The dealer mounted the 6' Woods disk first as my first task was to disk through last year's garden and chop up the corn stubble. With a few adjustments (such as changing the angle of the disk) and figuring out how the 3 pt hitch adjusted (such as extending the top arm to make the front and back blades disk evenly), I was able to complete task #1 in about 45 minutes. So far, so good.

 

[Birdbrain]

Must remember not to tab to start a new paragraph.....

On Wednesday evening, I did the same thing to my Dad's garden. Thursday, I took off from work to do tractor work all day. I am a little behind on getting the garden started because I had to wait for delivery and I wanted to get ready to plant veggies over the weekend.

So while I was waiting for my Dad to help get the plow off his trailer and hooked up, I tackled my first implement change. I started to unhitch the disk when I realized it was not completely on the ground. Backed up a step and put some old boards under it.

Then I attached my middlebuster. I have some small drainage problems around my buildings and need to work on 3 swales. I had one of them cut in less than 10 minutes. I was sold right there b/c that saved a lot of ache on my back (having started digging by hand last month). Then we got into plowing.....continued in "My first day of plowing"

Glen

 

[crabjoe]

"Slower Lower Delaware" ... I've always heard it called "Lower Slower Delaware", LSD for short.

How many people will this garden feed? It's hard me to me imagine needing to plow a home garden with a disk and such.

 

[Farmwithjunk]

I saw one of those Woods 3-point disc's at the National Farm Machinery Show. I was told they're a new item in the Woods line-up. It looked like a very nice product.

 

[Birdbrain]

Over the weekend, I disked the garden thoroughly. First pass, I had the disk set in one notch. It broke up some of the clods, but did not seem to be completely mixing things as I still saw a lot of dry soil after each pass. Second pass, I set the disk at the second notch just to see what it would do. It turned a lot more soil around, but then made hills and ridges. The front would make ridges on the outside, the back then made a cut at the outside and a ridge in the middle. Third pass, I set the front at one notch and the back straight trying to spread the ridges w/o forming more. This set up worked well and I was able to even out the surface fairly well. I even got the middle furrow (plowed to the outsides this year) filled in well. Finally, I passed over it with the drag.

I did have one problem. The disk is heavy and would shift side to side on the turns and hit the tires. I tried to tighten down the turnbuckles to limit the sway, but this pulled the lower arms out closer to the tires. I tried extending them to get the arms to move in. This worked when pulling the disk, but let it sway more on the turns. The arms seemed to migrate to the outside of the pins in either configuration. I got some spacers from the dealer this morning and I will try that to force the arms to the middle.

I have to admit that this was something I did not think about when tractor shopping. I was surprised by how tight of a fit many of the implements were. Even when the disk did not hit the tires, I don't think it cleared by more than a quarter inch.

Glen