The "big garden" is born . . .

It is amazing how many volunteers I have to help in the garden when a tractor is involved.  Armed with his recently acquired New Holland tractor and disc, my husband would probably have readily agreed to plow up the entire yard had I but asked.  As it was, I marked off a small section of ground and set Ed to the task of breaking up a workable rectangle for me, all the while executing impossibly tight turns to avoid taking out a corner of the garden shed on one end and a telephone pole on the other. After countless passes, the stubborn wiregrass let loose its tenacious grip and I was left with my own 60' by 30' block of rich, black Hyde County earth.  Ed and the boys made one more pass "just to smooth it out" before sending Ol' Blue back to the barn.  One's luck, however, can only just go so far, and the last turn of the tractor and disc was met with the rending sound of metal as the pole holding our DirecTV dish went crashing to the ground.  After much pushing, pulling, and kicking, my husband pronounced the dish "good as new," his words belied by the drunken swinging of the dish, streaked with dirt and festooned with streamers of grass.  In my experience, customer service representatives in India have a great sense of humor, and the repair man was scheduled at no charge.

After relaying the status of my garden to my on-call garden expert, a.k.a Dad, he deemed that the garden could not progress without being gone over with a tiller and then neatly rowed up.  He, of course, volunteered for this duty (see the trend here  - men, volunteer, "power" gardening . . .)  He and my mom made the trip from Knotts Island the next weekend with his battered old Craftsman tiller.  He and I unloaded the beast from the back of truck and got to work.  Well, Dad got to work.  Remember that I had been more of an observer than gardener when it came to my Dad's type of gardening?  After about 20 minutes of watching him man-handle the roaring machine of whirling teeth through my garden, I thought that didn't look so hard after all and gamely volunteered to finish my garden.  In case you had ever wondered what exactly it might feel like to be inside one of those paint shakers that you see whirring away at your local home improvement store, grab a hold of an old front-tine tiller.  An hour, two numb arms, four ground molars, and 50% temporary hearing loss later, I stood beside my Dad and gazed proudly upon the fluffy soil that was to become my "big" garden.  I thought that I would go over one more spot, "just to smooth it out," and tried to restart the tiller.  You would have thought I would have remembered the danger in this type of behavior (see above). The old machine gave a cough, belched a small puff of black smoke, and was quiet, never to start again.   I like to think of the tiller in a better place now, where the soil is rich and the rows are endless.

A lesson in creating straight rows from Dad involved twine pulled between two sticks, held tight from beginning to the end of each row and piled with soil on either side.  The lesson was peppered regularly with me asking obviously ridiculous questions to my father, "Why are we doing this again?  Why do I need rows?  Why do the rows have to be straight?  Does it really matter if the rows are straight?" after the 5th time in the same spot of him resetting the twine and re-piling the dirt.  After everything, we had 12 beautiful rows, plus room for tomatoes. I had also built a small walkway using some of our salvaged bricks from our house restoration so that the boys could run through the garden without trampling too much.   In the next few weeks, I put in plants and seeds, built a cucumber trellis from old fencing I found under drifts of honeysuckle in the woods, and the "big garden" was born.

A look a the garden in all of it's messy, leafy glory.