This invention relates to gardening, and more particularly to an apparatus for use with low power (7-18 hp) garden tractors for planting and fertilizing small gardens, such as home vegetable gardens.
Although modern, large scale farming has long employed highly sophisticated machinery, much of this equipment is not readily adaptable to use on a small scale. A limited number of implements are known and available for small gardens, some hand powered and some designed for use with small power units, such as modest sized garden tractors. Unfortunately, many of these represent little more than awkward adaptations from larger sized commercial machinery, and are inappropriate at worst, and awkward and inconvenient at best.
Thus, there is little standardization and only nominal interchangeability among many small garden components. Even the trailer hitches on small garden tractors, for example, show considerable differences. Wheel Horse uses a baring hitch; Massey Ferguson an elliptical plate; Ford a cross bar hitch.
As another example, fertilizer spreaders for small gardens should be rapidly and easily adjustable, so that the rate of application can be easily and frequently changed, as desired. This is important since only small areas are planted in a given crop, so only small areas will be fertilized at particular rates of application. Full or commercial size fertilizing attachments need to be adjusted only infrequently, and therefore usually lack provisions for quick and easy readjustments.
As still another example, in a home vegetable garden the rows are relatively short, so the fertilizing apparatus must be lifted frequently, as the tractor is turned, to interrupt feeding of the fertilizer. Full size garden tractors, of course, have hydraulic lifts for raising the fertilizer spreader, but these are lacking in low power garden tractors. Further, once lifted, the implement must be restrained against swinging out of position, to one side or the other. This is not always easy to do when tractor hitches show such variation.
As a result, small garden implements which have been adapted from large size commercial machinery frequently lack provisions for easy raising and lowering, for easy and frequent adjustment of the fertilizer feed rate, for attaching them to small tractors regardless of the hitch type, and for controlling their positions once they have been raised.