Post-Harvest Cleanup, and Moving Rhubarb

Most of the harvest is finished for this year so Marisa has been busy tidying up in the veg field - removing spent tomato and pumpkin vines, collecting seeds, shelling beans, weeding, and more.

This is what's left of the pumpkin adventure after her hard work:

And it's finally late enough in the season to move the rhubarb to a raised bed a few rows away. This will make it easier to weed, and far less likely to damage the rhubarb leaves while strimming or mowing. Here is the old location with a couple rhubarb plants still waiting to be moved:

And here is the raised box we built and filled a few months ago, now with rhubarb happyily replanted:

There are a few things still in ground - cabbages and lettuces, and the artichoke plants have been tidied ready for straw to protect them during winter:

Rush Mowing

This week has been fairly dry - a welcome change from some heavy Atlantic storms a couple weeks ago which dumped 40-50mm (nearly 2 inches) of rain in just a few days. And it's time to mow the rushes once more before the fields get too wet for tractors. The so-called 'rush' field at top of the road was mowed a few months ago including first mow of the western half of the field. So there were some fairly thick clumps of rush and mounds of cuttings to go through, but the little Kubota and topper mower did a good job with them - all 5 hours worth.

Here is the start of the job:

Continuing the next day:

Finished mowing as the sunlight was almost gone:

Road Extension

Finally had time to work on extending the veg field gravel 'road' after a load of rock was delivered. This time instead of individual bucket loads moved with the tractor, we filled and then dumped using the tipping trailer. This is a great unit known as a 3-way tipper because it can tip back or to either side and lifted by a hydraulic ram connected to one of the tractor spool valves.

I've only used the tipping mechanism a couple times since we purchased this trailer and it took a bit of experimentation to figure out how high to tip and how fast to drive forward to get a decent spread of rock. Lots of room for improvement, but cleanup pass with the loader bucket as a scraper worked fairly well.

The trailer can hold 6-7 bucket loads of rock at a time, and we managed to get 4 trailer loads dumped before it began to rain - about 16m (50ft) added.

Hopefully another 6 or so trailer loads in the coming days and then time for packing and leveling followed by smaller gravel on top.