Front Mount Makes Cultivating With ATV Easy

Front Mount Makes Cultivating With ATV Easy ATV S With all his plants on 48-in centers Norm Sieting has plenty of room to cultivate with his ATV Mounting the cultivator on the front of the 4-wheeler gives him all the visibility he needs “I bought a yard rake from Sportsman’s Guide online store but the tines weren’t heavy enough and the tines bent ” recalls Sieting “I built a heavy-duty one but found a use for the one I bought as a garden cultivator ” Sieting took the tine bar off the tow-behind carriage and mounted it on his ATVs modified front end He had previously replaced the ATV’s snowplow push tube with a receiver hitch with a riser hitch on it “I mounted a cargo rack on the riser and still had the lower hitch available for the cultivator bar ” says Sieting After removing the center tines he welded the flat toolbar to a hitch shank made from 2 by 2-in steel tubing and slipped it into the receiver hitch Initially the tines tended to dig in too deep “I added mounts for a set of wheels from an old rototiller to the bar giving the tines about a 1 1/2-in depth ” says Sieting “I also added galvanized aluminum shields inside the wheels to keep from running over plants It works great on the tilled garden and with the shallow depth the tines don’t bend like they did as a yard rake ” Sieting’s cultivator is just one way he uses the ATV in the garden He also uses it for marking rows He added 2 by 6-in shoes at 48-in intervals to a 10 ft pine board The shoes are angled and when the board is pulled through the freshly tilled garden it leaves trenches Pulling the marker board in a perpendicular direction creates a checkerboard effect “The trenches are deep enough that I can walk along and drop in seeds and then fill in the trench ” says Sieting “With transplants I put the seedlings at the intersections of the row marks and cross-cultivate as they grow I could cry when I think of all the years I used stakes and twine to make garden rows ” Contact: FARM SHOW Followup Norman Sieting 6112 Walker Rd NW Rapid City Mich 49676 ph 231-564-1031; normansieting@gmail com

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