12 February 2013

The first step to get the best sunflowers

Last January, we started to prepare the next sunflower campaign. Preparing an extraordinary fallow will be an important key if we want to get a good crop. Clearly, if we do a great job at the beginning, costs will be also reduced until we are going to sow our sunflowers.

A remarkable detail is the sowing date which will be in mid-April, so soils can raise a lot of weeds until that moment if fields aren't ploughed correctly. This means that if we don't perform a deep work in January, we will have to work few times more during February and March with chissel plough or mini plough. We chose to use discs plough, which allows us to do a large tumbling of the soil (with a working depth over 25cm) and we won't have to work it again till a few days before sowing, when we are going to harrow it with our chissel plough.

According to the discs plough used works very fine. It is an old tool manufactured by Paris Brothers (they closed their factory, which was in our Village, several years ago), but it continues working stupendously. This tool is auto-cleaning, so that we don't have any problem with our sticky soil. For the same reason, we cann't use a conventional plough. The Agrotron works without problems at 1,500 r.p.m. and at 8.5 km/h. The working width is of 2.5m so this task is slow.

As you can see in our pictures, we also used our mini plough with our John Deere in fields where we cannot carry out that working depth. The tillage achieved is absolutely different in respect of the tillage achieved by discs plough, so in these fields we are going to work few time more with chissel plough.

Versión en español.

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06 February 2013

Fight: John Deere 5720 & Fitosa Centauro against weeds

After sowing garlic and before they start to grow, we have to spray the soil in order to avoid growing weeds galore. After this spraying, we need to wet soil with a little quantity of water with the aim of improving the herbicide results.

That day began badly because once we had started to work it began to rain and then soil was completely muddy. We have to say our John Deere 5720 worked very fine with those climatic conditions (also it has the sprayer of 1,200 litres) and it used narrow tires. At the end, we could finish our task without problems.

Things that seem easy could turn complicated.