Plow Hitch Adapter

Here is a photo of the adapter I made to attach my plow to my tractor. The plow is a Brinly 12-inch one-bottom. It came with a sleeve hitch and my tractor has a category-1 3-point hitch. The adapter bolts to a drawbar (the red thing) and is shown here upside down. The vertical extension is the toplink attachment. I bought the drawbar but everything else was just steel that I had in my shop. I milled keyways where all the pieces attach and welded everything together. On the floor in the left foreground is a U-bolt that I made by heating a 5/8-11 threaded rod with a torch and bending around a piece of 1" steel. It attaches the coulter to the plow frame. In case you haven't guessed, I work at a machine shop on the weekdays.

The ground was dry enough again today to plow. I was making some mighty ugly furrows with ragged edges and sod strips in between, experimenting with the 3-point adjustments to bring everything into line. When I finally hit the "sweet spot" it was like magic. Everything fell into line and the furrows came out like someone had went down each one with a level and scribed a sharp edge. Very cool.

At this point I should say that I am actually an advocate of minimum tillage, although it may not sound like it. Since I'm beginning with sod, I wanted to plow everything under. In the future, I will not plow (or till at all) every year. My long term goal is for 1/4 to 1/3 of the garden area to be growing a perennial legume for cutting compost material and ultimately plowing under. According to this schedule, each section of the garden will be plowed every three to four years with the deep roots of the perennial legumes breaking up the subsoil and remedying whatever compaction may occur in the meantime.

Tomorrow, I will finsh the plowing and get the disc harrow out to finish the seedbed. I will post more photos of this process. We still don't have any lambs but our ewes are looking very pregnant.

tags: sleeve hitch adapter, 3-point hitch adapter, brinly, plow, tillage