My hoe

I feel that I should apologize for so many gardening posts. However, it's MY blog, and if I don't write about gardening, then you get to hear about Boring Moments in Mommying. So, while my kids watch Winnie the Pooh, I'll say a bit about tilling the soil.

I have a good hoe. It's sturdy and yellow and reliable. It's also very labor intensive to use on large areas. So for Mother's Day, I hinted that I would really like a small tiller or cultivator to weed and prepare the larger sections of our vegetable garden. I don't need a mega-muscle roto-tiller, just something that can handle mixing Moo Doo into a 9x12 bed.

Well, Quinn and the girls made a not-very-sneaky visit to Home Depot in Burlington (an hour away) and picked up a little unit that fit the bill. It was presented last on Mother's Day- after the chocolates and the new shirts- and we were all anxious to see it. I opened the box, pulled out the instructions, then the cords and battery charger, then the... empty packaging! They had grabbed the box for the display model.

We had a good laugh. Poor loves had tried so hard. Well, I went back to HD to return the empty box and get a real one only to discover that the display model was the only one left. Perhaps I wasn't the only mom with "cultivator" on her wish list. (HD accepted the box with no questions.) Hmm, what to do? Upon further research, I found that the kind of machine I had envisioned costs several hundred dollars- not in the budget at the moment. So I did nothing.

For a week now I have watched as the weeds slowly took over the place where my bean seeds are supposed to go. Cucumbers? Not in yet. Melons? Waiting. I resisted the call of the hoe for days on end, knowing what it would do to my already-compromised back. "To hoe or not to hoe" would run through my head every time I passed that patch of ground.

Today I had about an hour to work outside while Torin slept. I knew I could get most of the back yard mowed... or I could hoe. You guessed it- I got out that long, sleek (relatively inexpensive) tool and took out all my frustrations on the dirt. There were rock chips flying and weeds withering and grassy patches rolling over in their new graves. By the end I was sweaty and annoyed, but then I raked it all smooth and stood back to look. Ahh.

I hope I can get out of my bed tomorrow to plant those seeds.