Boys and their Farm Toys

Some how I always thought one needed tools and more machines to farm. I was right.
When we first started "farming" we did not know how like most everyone else starting out to work the land. Mind you we had a collection of books but like most other beginners books are great for theory but when it comes to practice it is another story.
A neighbor came by one day and gave us a hand for a few hours and that opened our eyes to implements that would help us. Our region is a fruit growing area and so vegetables on a large scale are few and far between. That friend grows tomatoes for a living.

So finally after planting thousands of transplant seedlings by hand we had built two implements and modified a third implement. The third one was imported from USA and a few things were added to it to make it more efficient. The implement on the left is a plastic mulch layer which uses 1200 mm wide plastic mulch. It has been converted to use 900 mm wide plastic mulch.

It can dispense two rows of T-tape ( irrigation lines) or single row. With the wide plastic we can do our onions and any intensive crop now. Previous seasons we did not use it and lost plenty of money due to weeds and water evaporation.

The transplanter is the large green thing. When this picture was taken it was not finished. Since than it has been wrapped in Shade cloth and can carry 3000 plus seedlings at one time.There are two 200 litre tanks given to us courtesy of James that are attached and with them we pipe into the ground liquid fertilizer mixture for pre-planting the seedlings. We use a blend of Molasses, Liquid Humates and a small amount of natural fertilizer to place the plant into the bed.

With this implement we can plant 3000 onions in an hour while if we had to do that by hand it would take two adults a few hours almost the day in labour to transplant. This way we can transplant 2000 chili plants in an hour or 3000 onion sets in an hour. We can do a entire area in short time. I had custom made transplanter wheels welded up to do 4 rows at one time. We have Pepper,Eggplant wheels, Pumpkin,melon wheels and other various wheel spacings to help us plant to the right spacing.

With transplanting 10,000 chili plants last season it would have taken us a week to do it in this fashion. Now, it can take a few hours to do and still be shaded. Last year the Farmers wife was pregnant and helping to transplant by sitting on the ground and crawling along. This way is a HUGE way better. It will also allow us to plant intensive seed crops like melons and pumpkins along with sweet corn in plastic. Just the other day I commented how I hardly spent any time weeding the onions. We do want to use the bio degradable corn based plastic mulches and we did shop the prices but being twice to three times the price of the normal plastic we did not have a budget to buy them. One of these days when we convert to certified organic we will.

The 3rd implement on the far right is a multi purpose tool. We designed it to carry two people on the back to either hand weed or to harvest onions , or garlic. You could also use it to harvest any ground crop. It can also remove the plastic mulch cut it and dig it out. It wont rewind or wrap the T- tape up. We have the parts to build that one later this year. This winter a friend James and myself spent days of slogging around int he mud removing last seasons plastic mulch and T-tape. This will make life easier. That is the goal for this farmer.

So until next time,

Farmer John going to work the fields