Brandy Carr Nurseries

Preparing the ground for Autumn planting using a 2 row ridger.

Timperley rhubarb about to be lifted.

Ploughing out the roots using a modified potato lifter pulled by a Ford 6410.

Another view of me ploughing out the roots using our ransome lifter modified over 40 years ago and still going strong. This machine must have ploughed over a million roots out.

A 2 year old rhubarb root freshly lifted.

Here is Al splitting the rhubarb crowns out in the field.

At typical rhubarb crown that has just been divided.

This is typical of the size of crowns that we send to our customers.

Roots are split using a half moon edging iron as seen here.

Newly split crowns are then put into a bulk bin ready for tipping straight into the hopper of our self propelled planter.

Here is our purpose built rhubarb planter, with the tractor in the background.

Rhubarb planter in action. It's an all wheel steer, 4 wheel drive rig powered by a 100 bhp Perkins diesel engine, based on my own design and built by Bob Mercer of Lancashire. I was very lucky to find such a skilled engineer. Thanks Bob, what a machine.

Here's the machine making a tight turn on the headland, Al is steering from the control box at the rear of the machine, this means the machine can be made fully operational by just one person.

Finally, a birds eye view of the operating position, showing how the machine can be operated by one or two people. The hopper holds around 4000 crowns, that's enough to plant about half an acre. Crowns are released from the hopper onto a cleated rubber belt which then deposits them onto a tray, ready to be planted. Using this planter two operatives working 8 hours per day over 5 days should be able to plant over 20 acres.