New toy
Part 1 in Plan Farm Cleanup is a doozy: Mama bought a tiller! Finally! I’ve wanted one for so very long… I feel like a real grown-up gardener now. 
I had been trying to do the whole garden more or less no-till, with my trusty shovel thrown in when it had to be… but it was just too much for me to do alone. With two kids, if I’m going to be out in the garden at all it will have to be at maximum efficiency: and look what my tiller did in about ten minutes flat.
That’s a thing of beauty.
It tilled up two of these long beds on Backfill Hill – something that would have taken me at least two days (since I can only get out there when the girls nap) to do with a shovel. Instead, it was done so quickly I even had time left over to clean out the chicken coop and spread all that beautifully composted manure over the fresh tilled earth as a weed-suppressing fertilizing mulch.
I looooove my tiller. It’s a 17″ wide rear-tine Craftsman with counter-rotating tines and a Briggs engine. It’s about ten years old so I have a feeling I’m going to be learning a lot about mechanics to keep it running… but so what. It may have trouble starting, and it may be 10 years old and well-used, and it may not be the very best thing for the soil in the long run… but it’s what I need at the moment and we’re gonna get along just fine. And with the plans I have for next year – and I do have plans! – it’s going to be in use a lot. It ought to earn its keep in no time.
But first things first… time to put it to work tilling up some of these grass-filled beds and see if I still have time to plant something for Fall!