Dad put me to work in the garden today. First he had me till the entire garden. He and Leigh Ann laid had out the rows far enough apart that the tractor and tiller can fit comfortably between them, so all I had to do was follow the rows. I only ran over one bunch of plants, when I was turning around and thought the last row on that side of the garden was unplanted. Oops: it was potatoes. After tilling, we set out six tomato plants and then sowed three rows of Silver Queen corn.

It’s always nice to get to know a new machine. Dad’s little John Deere garden tractor is a pretty capable machine and easy to run. Every machine has its little idiosynchrosies, but I eventually figured out how to engage the brake without snapping my neck. The subtle part of operating this tractor seems to be to goose the transmission handle to keep the thing moving when tilling at slow speed.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 11th, 2006 at 3:24 pm and is filed under Doings. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.