Bed forming

We created these raised beds by carefully misusing our tandem disc, then following with a modified flat-bed mulch layer (we removed a bunch of stuff and used some new brackets and spacers to hold the shovels backwards and outside the machine). Pretty good for not having the right tools for the job!

One of the many challenges of this year has been finding ways to do what we want to do when we're lacking the "right" tools for the job--how to stale seedbed efficiently, how to set up a good wash station without a fixed water supply in the barn, how to run irrigation up a hill without a high-powered pump.  One of these struggles has been how to form nice, clean raised beds to seed and transplant onto.  With soil like ours, raised beds can really be the difference between a good crop and a mess--they allow heavy rainfall to gather somewhere other than right around the plants' roots.  The soil right around the plants stays moist but rarely saturated, so even heavier ground performs nicely.  But we don't have a bed former.  So instead we've been trying to misuse other tools into forming beds for us. 

Today, at last, I think we've hit upon success:  We misadjusted the disc and then carried it through the field very crooked so it formed long lumps of beds ("rough forming" them).  Then we took our plastic mulch layer, removed a bunch of stuff, and used some purchased brackets and scraps of wood to mount the shovels backwards out where they're not meant to be.  We'd used a similar combo earlier to force our flat-bed mulch layer to lay raised beds of plastic, but it wasn't quite working for forming dirt beds.  Today we got the tweaks just right and it worked!   With this rig and very careful use of the tractor's draft control (usually used for plowing) we were able to form pretty decent beds!  It's nice when things work out like that...