Back before Christmas I ploughed most of the 5 hectare field but as it was my first attempt at ploughing I did have a bit of a problem in places. I just couldn't get the plough shears to dig into the ground, resulting in them just scraping the top of the soil. This occurred over quite a large area and then as quickly as it started, it stopped and the rest of the field ploughed correctly.
The result of this surface scraping is that the grass just grew back over winter. So I've been out re-ploughing the badly ploughed area which has been interesting. I've just about got the hang of starting on one side of the field and working across but I don't have the time to re-plough the whole field so I just ploughed the grassed areas.
This is the view of some of the grass. I'd ploughed the left-hand section first as it was the worst area and rain was forecast. As it was, the rain didn't happen and I have been able to go over the whole area.
All I have left to do now is finish the strip round the edge of the field and that's probably about another 4 trips round. I still haven't worked out how to do the corners properly yet but I think I've an idea from a bit of trial and error. I think it involves ploughing the outer line in one direction and the inner rows in the opposite direction.
There is a very great difference between ploughing here and the UK. Whenever I watched people ploughing in the UK there was always a large flock of seagulls following the plough. Here I don't get seagulls but I usually have half a dozen or so wagtails darting about. They're black and white but not the same as the pied wagtails in the UK. Apologies for the not very good photograph but they are rather small and flew away whenever the tractor approached.
