Grass: The Long and Short of It
July 28th, 2014 · No Comments · Posted in farming
I should explain this photo.
What you’re looking at is I the underside of our tractor. That fuzzy piece is grass wrapped around the drive shaft that powers our 60-inch mower deck. What I recently discovered trying to mow the tall grass in our pasture is that the tough stems from milk weed and goldenrod plants wrap around that shaft. They pull in more grass and weeds until the shaft is covered with a giant wad of foliage and starts to overheat.
Even though the mower deck isn’t designed for pasture, it never occurred to me that this would be a problem when we bought the tractor earlier this year. Last year I mowed the entire property with our neighbor’s borrowed rider mower. Now I realize his little John Deere mower was driven by belts and pulleys on top of the deck. They never came in contact with the grass.
So much for my one size-fits-all solution. What I’ll have to do now is save up for a rotary mower that’s powered from the rear of our tractor. Meanwhile, I’ve dusted off the scythe and started battling those pesky milkweed and goldenrod plants by hand.
Can you say, pass the Ibuprofin?
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