When the entire grass area was cer
tified as truly dead, the next step was to
churn up the whole mess.
Our soil was wet clay with a dense
dead topping—sounds almost like a com
mercially packaged carrot cake!—and
needed at least an 8-inch scoop. My pal
at the rent-all place recommended a
9-horsepower rototiller that weighed in
at about 200 pounds! It arrived on a flatbed truck, and after a very brief demon
stration, the rental man left with the encouraging words, “My wife used it last
week, and she’s only five feet four. She found it easy.” And he was gone. Th e ma
chine sat there solidly, and I imagined that it was growling at me, but then I have
a rather active imagination when it comes to machinery, with which I have had
some issues in the past.
I managed to get this monster started and engaged the forward gear. As the
tiller blades flashed down, my rental beast leaped forward, pawing at the ground
like a bull in search of a matador. As this massive, self-willed machine dug in, it
started to gather speed, heading down our steeply sloping land, coming perilously
close to the edge. My feet sank into the slippery, freshly turned clay as I reached
wildly for the kill button, within only a foot or so of the point of no return. Th e
monster died among the dead grass. I breathed deeply; the monster steamed
silently.
I had obviously taken on more than the machine could chew. Always the
optimist—and forever in search of my local knowledge experts when my own
intelligence fails me—I remembered my neighbor Kurt, a tall, broad-backed guy
who also happened to drive a backhoe. So together we manhandled the beast
around and around the lawn, which now looked like a scene from a World War I
movie: dead grass garnished with bright green plastic netting set against a slick
mud gray background relieved only by the odd startled worm.
We had begun to prepare the soil!22 • GROWING AT THE SPEED OF LIFE