Ready to Roll

 We received the miscanthus rhizomes last week, and found out what we were dealing with.

Boxes of rhizomes

Rhizomes is a box

The rhizomes varied is size. Most were a generid size of a finger with some roots attached. Every now and then there was a root that was close to the size of an entire hand.

Three standard rhizomes by my hand

This past weekend we were able to get the planter ready to go. After seeing the rhizomes we did a little re-design to get the planter ready to go.

We configured the drop tube to be a 6" PVC pipe that dropped center on the row. this let us add a nice seat behind the basket, and raise the basket to a workable height. We had to remove the old wheel packers, and rather changed them out for some old International planter packer wheels we had available.

Planter from behind

Added wings to the original plow shanks to prevent dirt from filling it the furrow

Side of the planter, taken when a little dark, but you can see the parts. 

The final version of the two-row 3-point mounted planter is a Lister plow shank followed by two disks that help push the dirt out around the drop tube. after the drop tube two small disk blades bring dirt back over the rhizomes and a press wheel at the end firms the soil around the rhizome. We expect to harrow the field significantly after the planting to level and help seal the soil bed.

It is still wet and rainy in Iowa, we had about 4 days of good weather, but our plot was still not quite fit and we were busy running in the spring time. We hope the week of May 15th will be our week to plant. Wish us luck!