As soon as we came home from the dump, we went to the garden to start preparing the soil for planting. It was just The Husband and me (Nanny was gone to the store), and he had to be on the tractor to work the levers, so guess who got the job of attaching the breaking plow to the tractor. It took a while, but we finally got it attached, but The Husband plowed a row or two and said that something wasn't right. We took the plow off and tried to figure out what was wrong. The hitching spot was off center of the tractor, and we could not figure out how to correct the problem. The whole business needed to slide 6" to the left to line up with the screwy bar thing on the back of the tractor. We had to find big sockets and wrenches and a B.F.H. By the time we'd gathered all that up, Nanny came home and, bless her heart, came out to help. Nanny kept insisting that "this has got to go under there," but The Husband had other ideas about what was wrong but didn't know what to do about it.
About 3:30, I called Son #1, who knows things about tractors. I said, "Can you come help us put the plow on the tractor before Dad kills Nanny and me." He was at work, but said he'd be there about 5:30.
I lured Nanny away from the tractor by suggesting we work on the fire ant hills in her yard. They have popped up everywhere for the past couple of years. An exterminator comes and sprays the mounds, but the ants just open up shop somewhere else. Nanny has bought some granulated stuff that's supposed to kill everything, including the queen. I told her I'd do the dirty work if she'd show me where the new mounds are. It worked like a charm, but I regretted it once I saw what we were getting into. There were a couple of mounds in her back yard, and several more up that l-o-n-g driveway. The granules were to be sprinkled on the mound and then wet with a gentle sprinkle of at least a gallon of water. Of course, the mounds were nowhere near a water hose. I came home and got my 1.5-gallon watering can that has a sprinkler nozzle and took it back to Nanny's and went to work on the ant mounds.
Son #1 arrived before we finished with the ants. He figured out what was wrong with the plow, and fixed it, and hung around long enough to swap the breaking plow for the disk, and then swap the disk for the tiller. By 7:30, the garden was tilled. By then, I was so tired and hungry that I didn't even think about driving the tomato fence posts into the ground.
We need a hiller/hipper/row-maker-thing. Uncle Jack lets us borrow his, says there's no point in spending money on something we only need once a year. But if we'd had one on the premises this evening, we could've made up the rows and been ready to plant tomorrow.
(Now that I think about it, I do believe that the big black tiller has an attachment that will make rows. The last time I tried to use it, I gave up after one row.)
Anyway, we couldn't plant tomorrow if we had rows, because it's raining now - storming actually.
Tomorrow, I'm going down to the garden to see where the water is standing. I've dumped loads of shredded leaves and tiny wood chips in the low spot, and The Husband plowed them in today. I do not expect that my piddly efforts will amount to much, considering the size of the garden. But I guess every little bit helps. Meanwhile, I'll do the smart thing this year, and not plant anything in that end of the garden until the monsoon season is over.
No comments:
Post a Comment