present day

Present day....May 5 2010.
Prince Edward Island

These two pictures were taken not one hour ago. At first glance they depict two different ugly scars of raw earth cut in a rather uniform manner.

Yup that is what they are.

They are that and so much more. First as i pointed out they are somewhat uniform, each a rectangle shape as a matter of fact. You may wonder why I make a point of indicating this uniform shape. Well I figure that if a space ship were to fly over. And they took the time to spot these two uniformly shaped plots of raw earth and if they judged these things in a similar manner to how man judges these things they may come to the conclusion based on the uniform shape that there is intelligent life nearby and that if they spot me before they spot the dogs they may mistake me for this intelligent life form. One has to look for their perks where they can be found.

Ok unless the aliens come by i will rationalize why anyone would do this to a perfectly good patch of earth.

These are our vegetable gardens.

The one with the dog in the picture and the wooden skids on end, measures about 20 feet by 35 feet = 700 square feet and the other is 15 feet by 20 feet = 300 square feet so we have a total of 1000 square feet of garden.

The first year we were here we only had the 300 square foot garden. It actually provided a pretty good yield. That first year a guy came by with his tractor and offered to rotor till it with his large tiller. He charged $40.00. That summer we bought about 12 tomato starters, and planted from seed a few beats, some beans yellow and green.

The next year I wanted to try and really make a dent in our grocery bill. To this end I decided to recoup a piece of field that has been tall wild weed for what looked like years. I cut that field with the lawn tractor and then asked the neighbor John who has a couple of tractors if he had a blade that could scrap off the sod?. He said yes....

Well he came by and the blade he thought would work did not! It only skimmed over the sod so he tried using the bucket on the front of the machine. This bucket instead of having a smooth flat blade was fitted with long prongs which is used to manage manure piles. These prongs made it impossible to dig in a precise depth and so what we ended up with was a very large pile of sod and topsoil mixture at the end of the garden. I did not want to seem ungrateful so i just left it at that. John a few days later came by with his tractor which now was fitted with a rotor tiller attachment and churned up the balance of the soil. He also tried to work the pile of soil/sod but the rotor tiller could not handle the mix most probably due to the angle / steepness of the pile. In hind sight and all things being equal I probably should of asked him to just rotor till the whole darn thing right through the sod.....what i was originally thinking though was that if the sod could be scrapped off just down to the top soil then there would be fewer weeds to contend with during the growing of the garden vegetables.....alas "the best a laid plans of mice and men"

So the resulting garden did not fair well. It was a struggle to persuade even a few zucchini to life.

That brings us back to the Present. This year I decided two things had to happen right away. The pile of sod/topsoil had to be spread back out over the garden from where it came and that both gardens required a good turning.

I decided that if started early enough even limited to working only 10 or 20 minutes at a time the earth could be moved by hand. This was started. I also looked into renting a walk behind rotor tiller.
That it turned out would cost 65 dollars for one day.

John I knew would rotor till the gardens if i was willing to wait til it could be fit into his busy schedule which i did not really want to do simply because i also had decided to plant the garden earlier this year so the veggies would have a longer growing season.

I did not like the cost of renting or getting someone in to rotor til as i mentioned spending money on these things reduces the benifit of growing a garden in the first place. So once i got the pile spread i would just keep going and turn the whole garden by hand.

This was going pretty good and i was enjoying the exercise. The sword had a double edge actually. One edge i was actually loving the work-out which was great but the fact that the work- out caused me to have to face again my new limitations was not so great.

When the garden was about 1/4 turned Cecillie's friend from work invited us over for a lobster chowder dinner. (her husband is a lobster fisherman and he invited me to come out lobster fishing this season and i am all with that.....later a few facts i learned about lobster history). The point is during dinner i was talking about turning the garden by hand to beat the cost and they have a walk behind rotor tiller and offered to lend it to me for as long as i may need it. Hmmmm the offer was great and i was very tempted but by this time i was enjoying the work and turned down the offer.

That finally brings us to the present day. May 5 2010 and there is 1000 square feet of garden all turned and ready to be planted.

I like telling stories in this fashion on the internet cause i do not have to see my audiences attention wandering. Maybe i will have to find some pics of people with very attentive expressions on their faces and put them up all around my desk top so they will inspire me to write ......yup shall i say it ........even more.

mac