Sod Bustin

Oy, my hands are sore. Arms and shoulders, too, for that matter. And my elbows...don't even bring them up. These are times when I miss having a bathtub as much as my Piscean partner does. A good long hot soak would sure do me good right now. You see my friends, this weekend was sod busting weekend. When we bought these 8 acres, the area around the house and outbuildings was all grass. I'd guess we had about an acre and a half to two acres of lawn all together. It took me about two hours of solid mowing on a 20 hp 46" cut Cub Cadet, consuming about 2 gallons of gas to cut my grass every week last Summer. I don't mind cutting the grass, really, it gives me some of that zen time I like to think about stuff. And I can't help myself, I really get a great deal of satisfaction in a beautifully mown lawn. To me, it really pops out as a great look. The neighbors all appreciate nicely kept homesteads (as do I).

But I know that lawns are also a waste of good soil sometimes, and they require lots of petro inputs, etc., etc. You won't find me on the short list of people who want to abolish lawns, no way. I love a good lawn. But I approach my lawnphilia with a common sense approach, I hope. One that allows for plenty of weeds. Heck, some years, in some places, if it weren't for the weeds my whole yard would have gone brown from drought. At least it still looked green from the street! Ha.

But this is not really a post about my lawn. It is actually a post about killing my lawn. I have gone and chopped it up into little bits, but it is all for a higher purpose! Karen and I have been merrily plotting and scheming and graphing and collecting bits in order to put in our first 'real' garden this year. So, much of the lawn has been sacrificed. We did manage to hastily dig up a bit of a patch immediately after moving in here this Summer, and we did get a decent crop of lettuce, radishes, beans, carrots, cucumbers and squash. But that little patch needed to be expanded by oh, I don't know, a million-fold or so. Why not?! We've got the land, we've got the willingness, we've got the seeds! We just didn't have a rototiller.

But have not fear, friend Lindsey who is a young farmer into digging veggies and working at the local co-op said she'd loan us her awesome walk-behind machine. Lindsey delivered the blue beast on Saturday. She showed us all of it's amazing features. I noted it was made in Italy. Hmm. The Italians are known to me as being fine cooks, vintners and artists. They can make some world class espresso machines and of course, some really nice slippers. But machinery? Yeah. Well I'm not one to look a gift horse in the mouth, so off she went, and off we roared to the bed in the backyard. 32X32 sq. feet for asparagus, strawberries, onions, and flowers and I don't know what all. Got about two rows done when there started a terrible grinding noise from the gear box. Karen and I banged, pushed, yanked, tightened, oiled guessed and cursed...but the dang thing just got worser and worser. After several hours of physically fighting with this thing we were exhausted and frustrated. Sore muscles, bruised hands, and frustrated. I put the Italian Job in the garage.

Then today we rented a tiller from the local hardware store. Smaller in width, but at least the tin was painted a respectable red color. However, as alluded to in an earlier post, those of us who work in concert with the good earth must deal with her changes. No turning up the heat or flipping on the lights out here. You just get what you get. And of course what I finally wound up with on the last day I had off was a wicked soup of clouds, wild easterly winds, and plummeting temperatures. I pulled the engine to life and threw her into gear, and the red tiller and I attacked my previous lawn with a gnawing, churning vengeance. Sometimes it would hit a dry spot and lurch forward at 50 mph, yanking my shoulders and yes, my elbows out of their sockets. Despite this, it was a kinder, gentler machine to commandeer over my sod. After a couple of hours, I had managed to go over all 3,000 square feet of our future garden patch twice. It had started to drizzle a bit, but that wasn't hitting the ground since the wind was blowing it sideways. When the dirt would periodically clear from my eyes I'd look up and make sure I was traveling in a relatively straight line. This was not always as easy as it may sound, since we had pigs on part of this ground last Fall. Though they were good at tilling up a lot of the grass, they were also very good at building ditches, swales, berms, and gullies. So the tiller and I pitched and rolled along, churning up the dirt into a rough loose soil.

After I finished the 3,000 sq. ft. bed, it was time to move up the hill and break ground on the future melon patch. This one was only 11X25 or so, I don't remember anymore. Why a separate melon patch? Why because we ran out of room in the first patch, that's why. Where else are you going to put all that sweet corn?! And I refuse to go without a fresh melon, besides. Just as I finished up tilling that patch on the hillside, the drizzle turned white and chunky. They had forecast a high of 56 today, and a chance of rain. This was not one of their proudest moments.

Be that as it is, by god, I got the whole damn thing tilled. At least the first round!

In the end, we will have created a win-win: more food for us to eat from our own efforts, and less lawn to mow. More of what we harvest will be powered by human hands, and less will be clipped by me on my Cub Cadet.

I just hope I can get all that thinking done on my smaller lawn.