Following The Plow
(Page 3 of 5)
May/June 1974
By the Mother Earth News editors
PLOWING
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Blondell's wife, Emily, told me that when she was just a sprout of a young 'un she and her mother and a mule finished a crop after her father became ill. Emily began rattling off jargon about plows, blind bridles and so on, and one could tell she spoke from experience. She said that if you had a good mule, plowing was easy to learn and not hard to do.
Theo agreed that if one is brought up to the business, there's really nothing to it. But I wasn't, and all its whens and hows were a mystery to me. When my husband began explaining, however, and when I'd observed with my eyes wide open, I could see that a little horse sense is all that's needed to know how to plow with an animal and what tool to use.
Then—although Theo was a bit weary from all my questions—I asked him a goody: 'Suppose you were a young man with a piece of cleared land and you wanted to take your newly acquired mule and plows and plant you a patch of corn. Give me a blow-by-blow description of what you'd do."
My mate heaved a sigh, looked into my faded, blue-denim eyes and began:
"The first thing I'd do would be flatbreak the field with the turning plow. I'd do this in November or December if I lived in the North, and as late as I wanted here where the ground rarely freezes.
"To flatbreak, I'd go all around the edge . . . keep plowing around and around and turning the earth until I was in the middle of the section of land. Then I'd let the soil lay all winter, if possible, until just before time to plant corn. For us, that means May and sometimes earlier.
"The next thing is to take the turning plow again and 'lay off' or make your rows. The best way is to 'four furrow': Plow two furrows with about a 12" balk (unplowed space) between. Go back, begin about 4" inside the balk and plow another furrow . . . then do the same on the other side so that you have only about 4" of untouched ground left in the middle. Do this all the way across your flatbroke field.
"After that, I'd hook the Georgia Stock to the mule, using the bull tongue and about a 20-inch sweep (see illustration showing sweeps), and this time plow out the balk. When I was all finished I'd have nice rows with little trenches in the middle, into which the corn seed would be dropped and covered by the planter. If I didn't have a planter, I'd use the Georgia Stock and just the bull tongue and go down each side of the trench to throw the dirt over my seed. May take longer, but it works just as well.
Later on, says Theo, the Georgia Stock—the plow of plows—is fitted with sweeps of different sizes to work the crop at various stages of growth. When corn is about six inches high, for example, it should be plowed with the bull tongue alone (we call it a "scooter", because that's what it does to the dirt). Ten days later you should till the patch again, this time using that old bull tongue and a 16" sweep. Then, in about 10 more days, the field should be "layed by" or cultivated for the last time . . . but for this final going over you use a turning plow. Simple!
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