I had a very fulfilling day yesterday (Saturday)! Friends of ours have decided after having a couple of years off from it, they are going to market garden. As it turns out, my Frontier tiller is a magnificent tool. In preparation for their garden for next year, I spent a large part of the day tilling their garden area, which totals a little over 12k square-feet. My tiller is about seven feet wide, and my John Deere purred contentedly the whole time.

Yes, my Deere usually purrs that way, but when tilling in the Ozarks, there are usually hiccups. I have multiple times felt like I might need a shower tilling as I watched the slip clutch start smoking and the PTO shut down. After a break, though it has always started back up. I try to keep it lubricated for every adventure. However, the Ozarks have a problem: we manufacture rocks. Here is what our land looks like about 100 feet from the house:

That continues down for about two feet at which point the little bit of organic matter is replaced with clay. If you wander down to our creek, you will find actual boulders sleeping on the banks. I surmise that this is from erosion from water flow over the past eon (plus or minus 950 years or so). At any rate, tilling our soil is very difficult. Rocks grow out of everything.

However, if one spends decades bending over, picking up, and hauling off rock, one gets the pleasure of tilling the soil in the top picture. Sigh. That is not what we have. Really, we should have had a lot more children and raised them here. Then we could have some soil…