I'm an avid gardener and over the years have spent a ton of money to solve problems associated with my hobby. Most of the solutions happily involved getting new machinery and equipment. Most recently I decided it was way to hard getting straw based horse manure (of which I happily have several sources for) into my dump trailer. Anyone who has tried to load straw with a regular bucket on a FEL knows how painful that can be. It is often matted in the paddock and simply rolls when you try to pick it up. I considered adding a tooth bar but then found a fellow near me who was able to build me a real manure bucket for $500. I've attached a photo of it and as you can see it is a solid piece of work. It does a great job of pushing lifting manure and turning my massive compost heaps. Turns out it has other great uses. I can lift and move an amazing amount of brush with it, pick up logs to cut with my chainsaw without securing them, I also use it to scoop up my self propelled tillers to transport to the farther reaches of gardens and food plots that are scattered around my 30 acre lot. Most recently I discovered a new use for it while I was trying to use it to dig potatoes. The potato digging idea wasn't a great success however the manure fork did a great job of double dig a garden to break up the hardpan rocky clay subsoil that is a problem where I garden. The tines are 27 inches long and easily dive almost 2 feet through my hardpan. I then tilt the bucket back and lift. The soil falls through the tines back into the garden in roughly the same location it was orginally located thereby avoiding pulling too much subsoil up or burying too much of the fertile topsoil. As I stir the soil I back across the garden a couple of feet and plunge the tines again. It didn't take long to nicely loosened the entire area that I'm setting up for garlic planting this fall. I have a Fred Cain subsoiler I had used it to break hardpan in the past but it has now been retired as it is no where near as effective for this purpose.
