Gardening

When we moved into our current home, the people we bought it from had a small child.  They had set aside a portion of the backyard and put in a small play area for their child.  Nothing elaborate, but a bordered area that they landscaped and covered with chips.  Since they took the play equipment with them when they moved we were left with a playground with no playground.  Our kids were older than what we could do in that space so we converted it to a garden.

At first, we didn't do much with it.  In fact, over all these years, we never put the whole thing into a garden.  It took several years to get all the landscaping material out so that there was nothing but dirt, but after a little bit each year, we got all the stuff out.  But, with everything else going on, some years  our garden was limited to just a strip of stuff growing along the edge.  Several years ago our neighbor was nice enough to come over and till the whole thing.  That was one of the bigger gardens we've ever had here; we planted a few rows of tomatoes.  That's what we have usually grown, tomatoes. 

Anyway, this year we decided to give it a major try again.  As mentioned, it has been several years since we had it tilled so we wanted to till it this year.  It had a lot of grass get in it, to the point that the last year or two we just mowed the grass rather than try to do anything about it.  So there was a lot of grass.  It has always seemed to me that if you treat weeds like grass, pretty soon you have grass.  Yeah, that's what happened out there.

It had gotten to where it was hard to tell where the edge of the garden space actually ended and the lawn started. Even though there are landscaping timbers all around, marking the edge of the garden, it was getting hard to tell. 

We had looked into buying a rototiller but I guess we waited too long into the season.  Every place we looked was out of stock.  We also tried borrowing one from a couple of friends but that didn't work out either.  So we rented one and brought it home.

We had to start by pulling out the tires that were part of last year's experiment in growing tomatoes.  I haven't actually measured it, but I figure our garden space is about 20'x20'.  If it's bigger than that it's not by much.  

But all that grass is pretty formidable.

Combine that with the design of the tiller we ended up with and it turned out to be a lot of work.  This tiller had the engine way out in front. That seemed to make the tiller want to go down instead of forward.

The grass kept getting waded up around the tines. Had to stop every now and then to pull all the grass out of the way.

Then a little later, it was stop again and clear out the grass.

The tiller had a hard time deciding whether to bounce over the top, chop along nicely, or dig down into the dirt.  So one minute you were pushing, trying to get it to move forward.  The next minute you were pulling back on it, trying to get it to dig up the ground.

We actually went over it all twice.  The second time over Brombeere actually took a try at it.  She only did across the space once and down the side before she let Schwartzbeere have it back.

Schwartzebeere did the majority of the tilling.  It was more work than any of us thought it would be.

When it was done, his hands were pretty dirty.

Then we had to clean the tiller up before taking it back.  That went quick and easy.

And now that it's all done, it looks much more like a garden.  

Back when we used to garden more we always tried to get it in over Memorial Day.  Before that and there was a risk of frost or snow.  After that and the already short growing season around here can often be too short.  For the kinds of stuff we have usually wanted to grow, getting it in on Memorial Day has always seemed to work pretty good.  This year we started a few things in little pots. That made it easy to bring them in on the cold nights.  But we haven't gotten them in the ground yet.  That's a story for another day.  But at least we're ready now.