Hi all. At the start of this year I planted my Potatoes at 26 inches between the rows. Bulking them up worked well with my merry tiller and potato ridger, but only when the plants were just above the surface. We’ve had a fair bit of rain lately and it’s begun to level off my ridges so I thought I’d run the machine through again just to bulk the ridges back up. Unfortunately it seems that the extension tubes for my ratchet wheels are going to hit the plants as these measure 28 inches wide when on the tiller, so although I can set the wheels narrow enough to miss the plants the tubes themselves catch. I’m guessing next year I’ll need to plant at 32 or 34 inch spacings? This seems very wide to me, my Dad uses a Massey 135 for his potatoes and the Massey implements work at 28 inches between the rows, so for a merry tiller to need to go wider between the rows than a tractor seems a bit counter intuitive to me. If anyone has any experience or a manual, or even better both for the merry tiller ridger I’d be grateful to know how you use your machine. I did think about using the smaller 12″ wheels directly on the rotor shafts without tubes, but these don’t seem to give enough traction when I had a practice run on some unplanted rotavated ground so I’m dubious about going that way. The 16″ ratchet wheels worked really well, it’s just that now the plants have grown I have a problem! It’s not the biggest problem in the world as I haven’t got that many plants so I can build the ridges back up with a shovel this year but it’d be nice to know how to do it properly next year. It was so close to working well this year too!
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