Crystal Madrilejos

We had to wait until the ground was sufficiently thawed and dried out a bit before we could plow. There is an old time farmer named Mr. Chandler down the road from us who was kind enough to lend us his plow. Last year, Andrew and Andrew’s dad and brother helped Mr. Chandler and his son put their barn door back up that had come off it’s track. Andrew said it felt really nice, like he imagined it was in the old days, neighbors weren’t strangers and everyone helped one another out. Afterwards, Mr. Chandler’s daughter-in-law baked us pies as a thank you!

Andrew’s dad drove the plow because he is familiar with them. It’s crazy how powerful machinery is! The type of plowing we did is called moldboard plowing which is a pretty intense way to turn up the soil and clear the land. Usually for gardens as small as ours this is a one-time, never-need-to-do-again plowing process. It’s hard on the land and over time, if it is done repeatedly, can actually ruin the soil. Next year we will just till and we should be fine.

The plow took about 10-15 minutes to clear a 30′ X 40′ space! That was the easy part. We then had to rototill the whole plot (it would have been ideal to disc the field at this point, but we didn’t have one of those). Oh, and the raking…ugh…talk about back breaking work.

The weeding for the first year is going to be absolutely horrific, but we just need to stay on it!

Next step: fencing.

–c.