The Great Garden Cleanup

Due to my malfunctioning camera, I have no amazing photos of our day of garden work. I'm sure you'll get over it. I have confidence in your resiliancy.

At 9am, our ward's Scout Troop converged on my garden next door, ready and willing to wreck destruction on all things of the plant kingdom. Interspersed with the work of pulling down cornstalks, sunflowers, and uprooting tomato vines, was a pickupgame of baseball with sunflower stalks for bats and tomatoes for balls. This quickly degenerated into an all out tomato fight. After the work was done, donuts and hot chocolate were passed around.

I recruited my kids to help too. Susan, Nathan, and Megan helped in the garden, while Karianne negotiated for indoor work -- she cleaned the kitchen. It was nice to come in after a long day's work and have the kitchen clean from top to bottom, instead of the usual disaster of dishes that awaits me after a day outside.

In about an hour, a day's worth of work was done. With a rented shredder, Tom reduced the mountain of waste matter into a nice big pile of compost-ready fluff. I fired up dad's old Troy Built rear-tine tiller (ok - Tom got it started the first time because I was too weak to start it cold) and prepared some ground for winter cover crops. What an awesome tiller. It's so heavy in front that it stays on course without any help from me. No jumping around or any silliness like that. I just walked along side it with one hand on the persnickety throttle that had to be constantly adjusted to keep the motor going. It's a bit annoying to have to baby it, but the upside is that I can't lend the tiller out, because it's so hard to keep it running. Of course, nobody else in my ward has a garden large enough to need a big tiller anyway.

The weather was perfect--sunny and cool, ideal for outdoor work. I like the feeling of having worked hard all day and being productive.