Well I just finished planting 16 acres and I am beat!
It rained down at the Fisher county property on Tuesday and Wednesday last week so I figured that I should get down there and get my fall food plots planted ASAP. I spent Saturday helping around the house and headed down to the land on Sunday afternoon. The grain drill that I bought a few weeks ago has been sitting on my trailer down at the land for a couple weeks so to haul my tractor down there to unload it I had to borrow a trailer from a friend. I had a hard time getting the tractor far enough forward to get some good weight on the toungue of the trailer so I ended up pulling it down there at about 50 mph and that was the first of several minor things that all seemed to go against making this a quick and easy project.
I got to the land around 5 pm and got the tractor unloaded and got started. I had my 8' tandem disc hooked up already and got started discing a smaller 2 acre field first. Even with the rain 4 days earlier the ground was fairly hard and I had to set my disc to put all the weight on the front to get it to dig in well. Because of this I had to make twice as many passes because when it is set all the way forward it digs in on the sides but not in the middle. So an hour and a half later I got done with the first 2 acres and I knew this was going to take a while.
I moved over to the larger field and got started. An hour or so later and it was starting to get dark, but based on how long it took to do the first field I knew I needed to keep going so I turned my lights on and kept after it. Around 11 pm I was running low on fuel so I went back to the front of the property to refuel and shut the tractor down. I ended up spilling some fuel when I refueled but didn't think much of it at the time. I messed around at the trailer for a few minutes and then went back out to start going again and the tractor wouldn't start. I thought maybe the battery was low from running with the lights on for 3 hours so I tried to jump start it with the pickup but it wouldn't even turn over. After a messing with it for a while I decided I would give up and wait for daylight and try to get it running then.
I went to bed around midnight and set my alarm for 7 am so I could get going as soon as it got light. Around 3 am the power went out and the air conditioner shutting off woke me up. Without the air conditioner running, the crickets chirping outside were so loud I couldn't go back to sleep. I laid there for a while trying to go back to sleep but I kept thinking about the tractor and what could be wrong with it and wondered if the breaker had tripped on the trailer and if I now had an electrical issue with the trailer so I ended up just getting out of bed. I checked the breakers on the trailer and everything was fine and nothing was working at the power pole so I decided that the power was just out and nothing was wrong at my end. I tried to start the tractor again and it was still dead. I had thought about the fuel spill on the tractor and grabbed some paper towels and tried to dry all the electrical wiring that could have gotten wet. I especially cleaned up around the starter and checked all the connections there. I got back on and it fired right up!! I was back in business!
I got back out to the field around 4 am and got after it. After the first pass I saw one of the discs had come off and was laying there in the field. (This is crazy because this happened to me before when working a 5 acre field at my house during the day and I never saw that disc again!) I picked the disc up and looked over the rest to decide what to do. I made another pass to see how much of an issue it was going to be and other than being a little noisy with on gang of discs being loose it seemed to be working okay. I decided that I would keep going and if I got done with this field I might be able to plant another 5 acre field tomorrow as well. Around 7 am that thought ground to a halt as the entire disc came loose from the 3 point hitch as one of the pins came completely off.
I unhooked and drove the tractor back to the trailer and tried to determine exactly what I needed because it is an hour roundtrip drive to go to town and back. I made it into Sweetwater and stopped at the Tractor Supply Company to pick up what I needed to fix it. They had most of what I needed but the staff wasn't very knowledgeable and I ended up having to improvise by using some plumbing fittings to get everything to work out. I bought some fuel and grabbed some McDonalds and headed back to the land. A little over an hour of pounding on the disc later, I had it back together and the plumbing fittings worked as I had hoped. One of the gangs was still a little loose, but overall I was VERY happy with my field repair job.
I got back to the field and a couple hours later was done with the discing. It was a little rough and there were some pretty large clumps of dirt that I had kicked up but I figured it was good enough. Now came time to unload the grain drill and start planting.
Another problem quickly reared it's head. My tractor wasn't strong enough to pick the grain drill up off the trailer it was on! I'm not sure if the grain drill weighed more than the guy who sold it to me said it weighed (he said it weighed 1,100 lbs) or if my tractor just won't lift what it is rated for (it is supposed to be able to lift 1,500 lbs) but it couldn't lift it. Part of the problem was that the tractor can lift less the higher up you go and the way it was loaded, I needed to hook up to the grain drill about 6' off the ground. I played around with it and if I worked everything JUST Right I could use the bucket curl to pick the grain drill 99% off the trailer with just a tiny bit still on it. I got in the pickup and after several attempts and adjustments I was able to drive the trailer out under the grain drill! Now all I needed to do was hook it up to the tractor fill it with grain and start planting, but it never is easy.
I had actually looked at the drill and the tractor hitch and thought before I went to town last time to make sure it would work and thought it would, but when I got ready to hook it up I found out otherwise. I needed a drawbar and that meant another trip into Sweetwater. Lucky for me, Tractor Supply Company had exactly what I needed and after another run through the McDonalds drive through I was back on my way. Without too much difficultly I had the grain drill hooked up and was ready to go. The grain drill is probably 40 or 50 years old and hadn't been used in at least 10 years so I spent a little while greasing it up (it has at least 30 grease zerks) and cleaning the hopper and then dumped about 100lbs of seed in the hopper. I'm planting a mixture of seeds for a fall food plot for wildlife so I put in 1/2 bag of beardless winter wheat, 1/2 bag of triticale, 1/3 bag of oats and 1/2 bag of winter peas and mixed it all together. I double checked everything and I was ready to go!
I made my first pass around the field and everything seemed to be working fine for the most part. Out of the 16 seeders the small discs on the front of 3 of them weren't turning but they were all planting seeds and the springs allowing them to move up and down all seemed to be set correctly and overall I was VERY happy with how it was working. I was concerned about the rate that it was seeding because I don't have a manual for the grain drill and have no clue what it was set at. The guy I bought it from and a guy who sold me a disc that was missing on it both said it was "set for wheat" but that could be anywhere from 35lbs per acre to 60lbs per acre depending on where you were at and what kind of rainfall you expected. Plus I was using 4 different types of seeds all mixed together and the wheat was probably the smallest seed out of the 4. I was hoping to plant the 2 acres and use all 100lbs of seed I had put in the hopper for around 50lbs per acre, but when I got done I still had probably 50lbs of seed still in the hopper. I had tried to be smart and set one of the gears at the 2nd smallest setting instead of the smallest setting and I think that made it seed at a slower rate. I moved it down to the smallest setting and put another 500lbs of seed in and mixed it up and started planting my 14 acre field. Again I was impressed with the old grain drill and it seemed to be working fine. I was also happy that the tractor was pulling it fairly easily and that I wasn't getting beat to death even when I was going on a different line from where I had run the tandem disc. I checked on the seeding and it was pretty hard to tell how fast it was seeding, but it was working well and going steady and that was good. The 3 discs that weren't turning would occasionally build up with trash (weeds, etc.) and I would clean them out. I got over 1/2 way done and I started getting worried about my seeding rate. I could hardly tell that I had made a dent in the seed in the hopper, but the hopper is wider at the top than it is at the bottom and I knew it was putting out seed because I could see it dropping into the chutes. I kept at it and after about 2 hours I was done. I still had about 100lbs of seed in the hopper so that means that I only planted about 30lbs per acre when I would have liked to have put down about 50lbs per acre. I still haven't decided whether I am going to go back and go over it again or just leave it as is.
After I got everything put up and unhitched I noticed that my tractor was leaking diesel fuel. A steady drip, drip about every 2 seconds. I had noticed some diesel had leaked on the trailer Saturday but didn't think much of it and attributed some of the leaking on Sunday and Monday morning to my spill when refueling, but there was no doubt now, there is a leak somewhere. The lights aren't working on the trailer that I borrowed from a friend and I wasn't going to make it home before dark so I moved his trailer around behind some trees so no one would be tempted to steal it and loaded my tractor up on my trailer and brought it home. Hopefully I'll be able to figure out where it is leaking tonight at it will be an easy fix.
I did see some wildlife while I was down there but I was so busy and focused on getting my planting done that I didn't even check what was on my trail camera. I saw a couple coveys of quail and quite a few dove. Around 7:30 pm right before I loaded up my tractor I saw a flock of 12+ turkey by the pond so that was pretty cool.
Other than the novel that I just wrote, not a whole lot going on. Eli just had his 9 month checkup is 30" tall and weighs 20lbs 12oz and has 6 teeth already and is working on 3 more right now.
Well, I'll be amazed if anyone read this entire post but I thought I would put it all down on paper or electrons or whatever you call a post on a blog.
That's it for now.
Nathan
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