Each spring, I go over to Action Rent-All and rent — for a period of precisely 2 hours — the same, broken-down, temperamental “mini cultivator,” as they call it. (Word to the wise: if you ask them for the “small rototiller,” all manner of confusion will ensue.) Every time we go through the same routine. The guy at the desk gets on the intercom and barks out, “Mini cultivator!” Usually, the guy he’s talking to sticks his head around the corner and responds, “Mini cultivator?” to which the guy at the desk says, “Yeah. Mini cultivator.” By the time I leave the front desk and head out to the parking lot, there’s usually three or four guys gathered around the (ahem!) “mini cultivator” trying to start it. It never starts. And once they get it started, it never stays running for more than a couple minutes. No bother. It behaves exactly the same year after year — which seriously makes me wonder if anyone else has ever even rented it. Anyway, I know the little trick to keep it running, so I take it home anyway.

This year, Evan was quite excited about it. He’s extremely interested in machinery of all sorts, and as you can see above, he got out his “lawnmower” to help me with the tilling. In a few short minutes, all of the cover crop is tilled under, and the nutrients suspended in it are returned to the soil for use by this year’s tomatos, peppers, beans, greens, and other veggies.

The cover crop. If you think about it, it’s not unlike what is currently happening on this blog. All of the winter’s experiences have been saved up and are now being “tilled” back into this blog to provide a basis for a new “crop” of posts. Spring truly is the most symbolic of the seasons….

This entry was posted by Steve on Thursday, May 3rd, 2007 at 5:25 pm and is filed under Family, Yard/Garden. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.