Farm-girl Lesson

When you go to rent a rototiller for the first time, and the guy behind the counter tells you that you need an eleven horsepower tool for the job you've described, believe him. Because if you don't you will pay with sweat, blisters, and if you're very unlucky, blood. Today has been a marvelous day of honest toil and I have learned my lesson about farm tools. It's been my dream to use a rototiller since I first started gardening and found myself shoveling up yard after yard of unforgivingly hard ground. I imagined that if I had a tiller I could plow through that ground like whipped butter. I saw myself at the handle of a shiny red Craftsman, like a nineteen thirties advertisement, easily gliding through my garden beds turning my obviously loamy soil, all red lipstick smiles because my life was made so effortless by this amazing tool.

To use a rototiller you must first find the switch that will turn it on, otherwise you may waste fifteen minutes trying to start the damn thing. If you rented it from Hertz there will be no instructions to inform you that there is an on/off button because they will assume that you already know this. Once you get the engine going it's a simple task to simply walk it in a straight line and watch the tines break up the soil. Well, it would be, if you had the right horsepower for the job. If not, you will immediately get nowhere. You will notice that the blades are not really engaging in the soil. This is because it does not have counter rotating tines which is very important if you are trying to till anything besides a soft flower bed. But don't worry, I know how you can make a front tine tiller work much harder than it's meant to. And I'm going to share my secret with you.

Basically what you do is fight the machine's instinct to pull forward. You pull it backwards in the soil and it will work perfectly well. It's exactly like trying to pull a stubborn fifteen hundred pound horse forward when it wants to go the other way. You might rip a few arm muscles doing this, but at least you will get the job done faster than you would using a shovel.

This is how I got my garden tilled. My chest muscles hurt, my hands are blistered, my arms ache, and I'm dead tired. But I don't care. I got to use farm equipment today. My vegetable patch even looks like a tiny farm. My last garden was so much fancier with the potager that Philip and I built with the brick paths between the beds and the arbors with fruit trees growing up them. It was lovely when everything was in bloom and when I managed to clean it up. I really loved that garden. But this one satisfies me more. Part of why I like it better is that there is a much larger space just for vegetables and it's not broken up by anything but an old pear tree. It's just a huge patch of potential abundance waiting to be realized. I'm finally getting the farm life I've dreamed about on a scale I can actually manage.