Rolling Dog Farm Blog

May is a particularly hectic month for us because we have multiple pasture and grounds maintenance chores to do in the brief interim between the snow melting (and the ground drying out enough to drive tractors over) and the beginning of grazing season on Memorial Day weekend.  We're cleaning out all the corrals, building the compost windrows, maintaining the drives, planting grass seed, dragging pastures that didn't get finished in the fall before the snow arrived, and fertilizing.

This weekend I was planting grass seed in areas where we had newly turned earth as well as in pastures that needed some renovation.  We use a seed spreader towed behind the tractor that can hold about 75 lbs (34 kg) of grass seed.  One of the areas where I planted seed was in the Widget's House yard, where we had just put in a gravel lane from the gate along our main drive all the way to the front of the building, along with a gravel "pad" off the porch.  This is about 200 feet (61 m) worth of lane, so it's quite a stretch.  Without a gravel lane for vehicles, the yard had become rutted and beaten up, and it was nearly impossible to maintain vehicle access in winter time.  (Our method of transport in winter?  We actually had to load supplies like dog food, laundry detergent and cases of paper towels on a sled and pull it by hand across the snow to the building!  The dogs declined to pull for us.)

So after the lane went in last week, we had an area of bare dirt that needed to be seeded with grass.  Once I put the seed down with the spreader, I hitched up the ground roller that presses the seed into the ground to ensure firm contact with the dirt.  This thing is huge — about 7 feet wide and weighing about 3,000 pounds (1,360 kg) empty.  But wait, that's not heavy enough for the job!  We actually fill it with water using a hose — there are pipe fittings on either end — to add additional weight, because you really want to squish the seed down. 

Completely full of water, the ground roller would weigh about 7,000 lbs (3,175 kg) which is a lot of weight to pull around with a compact utility tractor like our Kubotas.  And if the equipment you're pulling is too heavy, it can end up controlling the tractor — tipping you over on a grade, for instance.  Although this ground roller is "rated" for our Kubota tractors, it would make me too nervous to have it that heavy, so we generally only fill it about half-full — which is still plenty heavy.

How do we get the water out of it?  We open the pipe fittings on either end, let as much water drain out as possible, and then roll it up and down the drive to get the last water out.

Alayne got these photos of me rolling the seed into the ground at Widget's House on Saturday.  We put some of the dogs up in the pen on the porch, others in the side yard and a couple of them inside the building.  We might be the Rolling Dog, but the last thing we'd want to do is end up, well, rolling a dog!

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Enter
"Rolling Dog Ranch" and our state postal code, MT for Montana,
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