We were eating breakfast yesterday morning when the local Sears store called to tell us that our tiller was ready for pick-up.  As soon as we finished eating, we went to get it. 

It was in a big crate.  We backed up to the loading dock, and the store employee scooted it right into the bed of our truck, no problem-o.  There was a problem-o getting it out of the truck.  We finally had to peel back the cardboard crate, remove the wooden supports, and hoist it out with a chain and Pop-Pop's hydraulic lifting thing.  It took us about 30 minutes to get the handle and gearshifts on it. We oiled it up and gassed it up and plugged it up (it has an electric starter). 

With one push of the little red start button, the engine cranked. 

Hallelujah!  Joy!  Joy! 

This may very well change my life!  :)

We couldn't take it for a test plow, because the ground is too wet.  But you can bet I'll be trying it out before the week is up, if we don't get any more rain.

I took a look at the garden after we stashed the tiller in Pop-Pop's shed.  There is now an electric fence around the potato rows.  Something - raccoons, we think - has been digging up the potatoes we planted last week. 

I guess they've already eaten the ones we threw over the hill when Pop-Pop wasn't looking.

Magic Words

Over the weekend, when the family was lingering around Nanny's table, my son asked me if he could borrow the little black tiller to work on his flower beds.  I told him, "Sure."

Nanny said he ought to try to crank it before he loaded it, just to make sure it still worked.  "It's a booger to crank," she said.

I told him not to give up after the first few cranks.  "Sometimes, there are some magic words you have to say to it before it'll start."

Pop-Pop chuckled.  He's heard the incantation a few times.

"I bet I know a few of those words," my son said, grinning. 

Nanny said she wasn't convinced that the magic words actually worked.  "I've said a few 'magic words' to it, myself," she confessed.

We all laughed.  We've heard Nanny's "dad-gums" and "shoots" and "spits." We didn't think the tiller would have paid much attention to them.

"My magic word vocabulary might be a little bigger than yours, Nanny," my son said.

After lunch, we went outside to find the tiller.  It wasn't in Pop-Pop's shed as I had thought, but I found it in my shed.  I dragged it out and took it to Nanny's.  Josh put some gas in it and prepared to crank it.  I showed him how he had to flip this switch, and slide that lever, and push that turkey-timer button on the side.  "If it cranks," I told him, "run it out there and loosen up a row for some onions." 

He gave the cord a good yank, and another, and another, and another.  He adjusted the choke, and yanked a few more times.  "You sorry son of a - "

"HEY!" I said, "Not yet!  You've started the chant too soon!" 

He fired off another round of magic words, and yanked the cord again.  The tiller fired right on up.

"Nah," my son said, adjusting the choke.  "You haven't been starting it soon enough!"  He revved up the motor.  "Whatcha want plowed?" 

'Tater Plantin'

The potatoes are in the ground, three long rows of them.  My son and his wife helped.  Tomorrow, we may all three be so "stove up" that we can't get out of bed.  'Tater planting is hard work!  The twenty-five pounds of seed potatoes yielded nearly a five-gallon bucket of potato chunks.  As I dug the trenches for the first two rows, my helpers came behind me, one dropping potatoes in the row, the other covering them up.  I gave out at the end of row two, and my son took over the trenching.  At the end of row three, he was pooped, too.  We looked in the bucket; it was still half full.  I looked at my son, and he looked at me.  He said, "Let's chunk 'em." 

"I second that.  Don't let Pop-Pop see, though."

We waited until Pop-Pop went back in the shed, then my son pitched the contents of the bucket over the hill.

Watch those lay there and grow better than the ones we planted.

We also planted some red onions, some fava beans, and some carrots.  (I have never had even one carrot seed sprout in the garden, but I had a packet of seeds, so I planted them.)  There is still plenty of room for cabbage and broccoli.

Yesterday, when the men-folk were in charge of preparing the soil, they decided we needed a new tiller.  I ordered one from Sears today, one that has an electric starter (yahoo!) and a handle that swivels to the side so that the operator can walk in the middles while he/she tills the rows.  It should be here Saturday.

Back in the Gardening Business

When I talked to my sister last Sunday, she said that I should hurry and finish her quilt because it's almost gardening time.  That thought had already occurred to me, but I figured I had a few more weeks before planting time.  The garden centers here aren't yet stocking their early vegetables, like broccoli and cabbage, and probably won't have them until at least the first of March.  I have sweet pea seeds, and fava bean seeds, both of which could be planted now, but, to tell you the truth, I've been kind of bummed out on gardening.  Last year's summer vegetable garden was such a phenomenal flop that I didn't even plant the fall crop seeds I'd bought.  I had decided to cut back this year - maybe just a few tomato and squash plants - and it won't be time to plant those things for a couple of months.

Yesterday afternoon, I came home from work, put on my "house clothes," and went to the quilting machine, thinking I'd knock out the rest of my sister's quilt.  (I only lack about a foot being done with the quilting.)  I'd just tightened the knobs on the quilting frame and was sliding the machine into position when the telephone rang.  It was my daughter-in-law, telling me that they were across the road at Nanny's house, and I'd have time to grab hugs from the grandsons if I'd come on down.  I jumped into some shoes and walked down the driveway.

Long before I reached the house, I saw a wide strip of freshly-plowed earth in the garden spot.  What in the world was up?  The garden never gets officially plowed this early!  For years, I've begged Pop-Pop to plow the garden for an early crop, but he has never, ever done it.  But there sat the little tractor, with the disk attachment hooked to it, fresh dirt on its blades. 

It was a pleasant evening, and everybody was out in the yard.  Pop-Pop was sitting, smoking a cigarette, in the doorway of the tractor shed.  I said hello to everybody, then turned to Pop-Pop.  "What got into you?" I asked him, nodding toward the garden.

"Time to plant 'taters," he replied. 
Taters?  Who said anything about planting taters?  I surely hadn't!  I'd tried growing potatoes a few years ago - you can probably read about it in my 2008 posts - and it was a screaming failure. 

"I figure 25 pounds of seed taters ought to do it," Pop-Pop added.  He thumped his ashes. 

Twenty-five pounds?  Good grief!  My one attempt at growing potatoes involved only a 5-pound bag of seed potatoes, just two half-rows, and that little bit nearly worked me to death.  I had permanently marked potatoes off my list of things to grow.

"Well, allright," I said.  "I'll go find some before the weekend."

He said he was going to disk it again today. 

"Put a couple more rows on it," I told him.  "I have some seeds...."

Learning Things the Hard Way

I should be quilting.  Or, more exactly, UN-quilting.  But I get so dang frustrated that sometimes I just have to say, "Scr*w this for a while," and go do something else.

The quilt I mentioned in the previous blog is about 90% finished.  A tip from a mailing list convinced me to first quilt all the way across the top border, then quilt the area between the side borders (leaving the side borders free), then quilt all the way across the bottom border.  I then unloaded the quilt from the frame and re-loaded it sideways, the point being to enable me to quilt the side borders in one long stretch, rather than in short bursts, as I would have done.

I have been dreading this point for weeks.  First, I was almost dreading unrolling the quilt and seeing the whole project in all (or 90% of) it's glory.  Up to now, I'd only seen 9"-wide stretches of the quilt.  I knew that I'd encountered multiple little problems along the way, and I hadn't always been happy with the way I'd fixed them.  Would the sum total of all these little messes make the whole thing look shabby?  Secondly,
this is my first "real" quilt with this machine; turning this quilt in the frame during the quilting process is a step I had not practiced. 

Note to self:  don't try a new technique on something important, as there will always be unanticipated kinks.

I unloaded the quilt a couple of days ago.  Before re-loading it, I spread it out on a bed to examine it.  Thankfully, though it is far from perfect, the overall effect was not as bad as I had feared.)  Deeming it worthy of finishing, I re-loaded it into the frame.  It took several tries to get it right.  I had trouble getting the borders to lie flat and straight.  I had trouble transferring my quilting design to the fabric.  Then, when I finally began to quilt, I had trouble with extra fullness in the border.

Now, a professional quilter would be wondering why I'm having so much trouble getting these side borders to lie flat, and might suspect that my borders weren't straight and flat to begin with, but that person would be wrong; I was meticulous in my measuring, cutting, and sewing; this sucker was straight and square, once upon a time.  A professional quilter might also wonder why I didn't transfer the quilting design to the fabric before I put the quilt back in the frame.  That person might be correct in suspecting that, in some things, I am just plain dumb.  In any case, after quilting the first row across the first side border, I found that there was a big mess of puckers under the quilt, where I hadn't been paying such close attention.  I'm going to have to take that row out. 

But not right now.