Working the Soil

As you may have guessed by the absence of a post yesterday, all my kids were home. That feels so sweet as a mother. I love having them all together, especially now that the three oldest are grown. It's a rare thing!

Well, since it's Tuesday I should continue my story of small town life. We'd moved into our little rambler in the country and had begun meeting the neighbors in my last two posts.

We had this grand idea of raising our own food. Or at least as much of it as we could. So the first thing we began to do the spring after our move was to start a garden. We chose a spot on the east side of our property, almost 1/2 acre in size. There were few trees on our place at the time so there would be plenty of sun and it was fairly handy to the house when harvest time came. The site had previously been a hog shed that had collapsed. The farmers had hired a bobcat to bury it. It was deep enough that that wasn't a problem for us but the ground had few nutrients for growing produce, something we would have to deal with later.

John rented a tiller but the ground refused to let it dig in, it was rock hard. So we bought an old 1940s Ford tractor and a plow to begin the long job of working the soil.

Round and round he went, with me following behind pulling out any rocks the plowing upturned. Since it was spring the farmers were working in the field across the road. They took notice of our efforts and actually parked across the way in their tall enclosed tractors to watch the spectacle. He teased John, "How'd you get your wife to do that?"

When the earth had been sufficiently worked we bought a large tiller, that was up to the task, and tilled and tilled. He must've worked the whole weekend getting that soil soft enough to plant. But finally we had the ground ready for seeds. We put in a row of asparagus, rhubarb, strawberries, cucumbers, zucchini, peas, beans, you name it we planted it.

Oh, it was a lovely time. Watching our hard labor sprout into food that would fill our family.

To be continued next week...

Traci