Dead In The Garden

The beautiful spring weather, after the sun breaks the horizon to warm the frost laden ground, has got me out in the garden. Or it had me out in the garden until I had a small issue arise. The trusty old garden tiller seized up on me. What is frustrating about the whole thing is that this rototiller has been a stalwart, my trusty tool to wrangle the wayward soil into garden loam.

This tiller has had a few bumps and bruises over the years. Seems like the belts need to be changed more often that most machines, and the pull rope to start it has broken more times than I can count. But for those few quirks, the tiller had worked well, until it didn’t.

I had broken open the soil last week with a quick go-over to let the sun dry the chopped up dirt. Then over the last couple of days went over the ground to break the soil up more, when I was ready to do one last till before planting the tiny seeds of the cool weather veggies, the tiller stopped. That is not quite right, the motor still purred, the tines spun, but the tires did not.

Onto plan B for now, I’ll abandon the shady garden area where the lettuce, radish, and early carrots like to grow until I can fix the broken tiller or borrow one to catch up with the spring plan. Mike got the power tiller attached to the smallest of the farm tractors and went over the main garden several times. Although this brute of a machine for the small garden area is heavy-duty over-kill, it nearly has the ground worked up enough to get some of the veggie seeds started.

I would typically work the soil even finer with my little red tiller, but this will have to do for now and hope the seeds have the soil worked enough to keep them moist while not suffocating them as they sprout.

The border row that held my ‘tired’ potatoes  the last few years will become the spring greens row for this year. It will be interesting to see the regular garden plan get changed up and just maybe moving the scheduled rows around will work out for the better.

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