Diggin' taters

I took a walk in the field across the street that I'm thinking about incorporating into the farm next year... a rain cloud came by and dumped on me, while the sun was still shining. The result? A very good sign.
All these photos were taken with my phone; hence the black things in the corners- my weatherproof carrier got in the way.
A most exciting thing: my friends Eli & Doug helped me pull the old potato-digger out of the woods! It's a rusty thing probably 100 years old- meant to be horse-drawn, but we were going to try to hook it to the tractor. We greased & oiled it up-- there are a lot of working gears & levers, all functioning off the rotation of the big rusty metal wheels. I didn't have high hopes. I thought it would just fall apart before we even got to the field. We creeped at lowest speed out to the potatoes. The sun made the oil gleam on the moving conveyor belts. We all stared at the gears in wonder-- it felt like some kind of revolution.
(We had been digging potatoes by hand with a digging fork.)

Lo and behold, it worked. The plow point pushed into the hill of potatoes (we could lower or raise it) and up came everything, the potatoes, the dirt, the rocks. The 2 sets of conveyor belts shook off the dirt as the potatoes rolled off the edge gently onto the soil.

Oh yeah, and there is a seat on it (so you can drive the horses I guess)!
We did a whole 200' row of them.
Doug adjusting the depth of the plow point.

Now we just had to go along & pick them up! No digging like before-- it took a lot less time & muscle.
Okay, turn your head sideways. Here's the old tater digger, hooked up to the new Kubota. It was a beautiful multi-generational cooperation.