Sinking Feeling - Part 1

It's been a bit since the last post... I think I have been stuck in a bit of a rut... (ahem)
What happens in the spring when you get an overly ambitious, cooped up, cabin fever aspiring small scale farmer... a tractor with 4 wheel drive... a mushy field... and a ground engaging implement? Well - you get a mess. A big one at that.
Like so many big messes in the history of the world - it's quite often predicated on really good intent. The problem I was hoping to solve was simply smooth out the pasture space that's in front of our house. It's where we might keep some hogs down the road but it was last (years ago) planted as a corn field and still has the pattern of rows in the soil. The plan was to simply run in parallel with the rows with the disk on... then to run perpendicular... and that would have smoothed things out quite nicely. And the plan started off just fine...
Now - at the outer edge of this pasture area we have a small patch that grows some of the tell-tale wet area marsh grasses... so I kept a wide berth of that spot because I fully knew power of wet soil in the spring and it's ability to swallow tractors whole. So - I navigated the rows with the disk on - made good progress - could even tell things had started to smooth out because when I would make a turn I could feel the fresh turned earth under the tractor tires falling into the valleys and making the pasture smoother. It was a nice spring day and I was making solid progress... riding along - I felt the tractor slow slightly... almost imperceptibly... and I instinctively reached over to lift the disk up a few inches. That's pretty standard - when the tractor gets bogged - lift the disk - less ground engagement - tractor regains footing and keeps moving - drop disk.
I pulled up on the lever - and the tractor pivoted... the higher the disk was supposed to go - the further it "pushed" the rear wheels into the wet soil. I have never been a "tire spinner" and have gotten a lot of heavy motorized things stuck over the years... but almost in an instant - I was in a situation where the poor little Kubota had no where to go... the rear and front were almost instantly so far into the muck that I was sitting frame on mud. The disk was a high as it could go but still firmly planted in the ground... I was going nowhere.
The good news was I was just going to be finishing the field - and from the barn to where the tractor was stuck there was a straight shot of undisturbed - solid ground... surely I could just back the truck up on this strip of terra firma - hook on a tow strap - and be done with this small mess in short order...

Comments

[Jeph]

What a mess! I bet that was fun....

[Andy]

You be the judge... there's 2 more parts to the story!

[Unstuck (a year later) | Chick]

[...] the little orange Kubota sink into the muddy spring field (oh wait it was just last year – http://www.chickenthistlefarm.com/2009/04/sinking-feeling-part-1.html).  Being a nostalgic fellow, I figured, why not again…  Especially considering the date on [...]