Harrow

A few weeks ago I drug a harrow around the ranch. I did this partly to aerate the soil but mainly to smooth out pocket gopher hills. The problem is that flattening and scattering their hills made it harder now for me to find their tunnels. Usually the pocket gophers are busy tunneling and making new piles of dirt but I think they are in the middle of "gopher-birth", or have young to care for and aren't as busy wreaking havoc - they are occupied raising the next generation to wreak havoc. I only get one, maybe two, gophers a day now and not the three or four I had been capturing. I persevere in trapping them as I am close to clearing the hayfield.

In addition to the hayfield where the majority of the pocket gophers are (were), I also drug the harrow through most of the pastures. The north pastures have the least amount of trees, the shortest grass, and is the smoothest, so it wasn't too bad to do. The south pasture was next. Taller grass and more trees and not quite as smooth. The middle pasture is the roughest, has the most trees and many tree stumps, and the tallest grass. I did a little bit of this pasture before quiting. I decided I would try to burn the grass first to make it easier to drag the harrow and also easier to see the low tree stumps.

Now don't let me give you the impression this was quick. I pulled the harrow at an average speed of 7 mph for hours a day over a number of days, and drove quite a few miles going in circles. Around and around and around... This year, unlike the past years, was wetter so I didn't raise a cloud of dust.

While it is supposedly good to aerate the soil I can definitely see the difference in areas I harrowed and areas I did not. Today in the NE pasture I noticed a big difference in the grass between the harrowed and unharrowed areas. Raking the soil with a harrow certainly stresses the grass in the short term.

Here are two photos of the harrow from a few years ago. As I am not going over a plowed field the extra weight is to give the harrow's teeth some bite into the ground. Time has taken its toll on the harrow as it is missing a number of its teeth these days.