Raking and harrowing the pasture

A few days ago I finally finished harrowing all of the pastures.  I did the middle pasture last as it was the hardest to harrow.  Since I kept and fed the cattle in that pasture over Winter there was lots of manure all around the pasture.  Plus hay remnants from the feedings.  And since the cows like to lay under the trees there was lots of manure under those trees. While manure is good and fertilizes the ground, too much manure under trees and close to the tree trunks can be bad for the trees. Since I can't drive under or close to lots of those trees I ended up hand raking the manure away from the trees. Under some trees the manure was so thick from cows laying on and flattening the manure over and over, I had to chop the manure with the rake to break it up so I could then rake it away from the trees.  That manure was so thick it was killing the grass under it.  The hand raking took a lot of time to do over a number of days.

Here are a few photos from a couple of the trees.

And another tree.

A number of the trees have roots poking out of the ground that go a distance away from the tree trunk.  Those roots were hard on the harrow sections breaking or bending parts of the sections.  I have six harrow sections that I chained together.  I had to re-adjust the sections.  One harrow section by the time I was done was in pieces.

Before and after.