Tilling Mania

by Angie
With summer half over and the weeds high in the garden, I have finally gotten my tiller back to the garden. If you remember, it has been broken for well over 6 weeks. So during that time, I decided to not fight the weeds, the grass, the insanity of it all and leave the garden to grow by itself. Now, I am dealing with the aftermath. Imagine, leaving your children for six weeks, letting them eat or drink whatever they can. Wild to the wind. Yes, that is what my garden has become. We tried to dig the potatoes. Oh, last year it was the great Irish Potato famine. This year was different. I had great big plants. They looked luscious. Until the tiller broke. Now, we had to look thru the tall grass to find the brown stems of a once alive potatoe. Digging into the dirt, hard has stone. It felt like clay. Mud clay. Isn't that what the Native Americans used to make their eating utensils? All the onions were still out there as well. Their stems had all but dried up. I found some, dug them up and they had grown about half an inch. Seriously. Now, I am contemplating not putting out a garden next year, and support the local farmer's market. Those tomotoes, they are having some blooms but that shaking them everyday is getting a little old. I can only shake so much, ya know? The lesson to be learned here is this, when you use those little red flags out there to spot a row, pick them up when the plant starts growing. They don't need to be tilled into the soil.