Tilling the Beds

In the top picture there are still wildflowers growing in what will become the garden beds. I let them grow all summer, having last cut them back in May. The butterflies and bees appreciated it and they were easier to pull. Over the course of two weeks, one day each week we prepared and tilled the beds, cleared the blackberries and removed the lattice. I pulled the "weeds", and Meredithe and I cut back the blackberries in early October.

The next week I removed the lattice and ran the Gravely over a section of the North bed that had a lot of blackberries and tall grasses in it and was difficult to pull. I'd say it was only about a third of the one bed. It only took 30 minutes or so. After the beds were clear I began tilling.

I rented a Honda FRC800 8HP rear tine tiller from my friends over at Madison Rentals. They're a locally owned and operated tool rental business. I also ordered the Gravely from them earlier this year. They're conveniently located right off of I-20 on my way to the farm on Eatonton Rd 129/441 just on the other side of the lake.

The tiller worked great! On the first pass I was a little apprehensive because it seemed like the tines were just skipping along the top of the dirt and I had to hang on tight to keep the thing from running away from me. By the third pass I was dug in a few inches and running along smoothly. I ran it straight through with the exception of just one short break from about 9:30 am until 2:30 pm. The beds were originally marked at 60' x 5', but I'm an overachiever so the tilled area is realistically more like two 60 'x 8' beds, almost 1,000 square feet!  I'd estimate the average completed depth is somewhere between 6" and 8". Not sure if 200 sq/ft per hour is a good work rate or not, but that's about what it was.

In the bottom picture, the four larger white posts mark the corners of a small compost pile. Just to the left the disc harrow is visible, completely freed from the blackberries. The white blob in the middle is the wellhead covered by an old billboard used as a tarp and weighed down by cinder blocks. Hopefully we'll construct housings for both the wellhead and the compost before the wedding. The bushes in the middle near the back of the wedding garden are a butterfly bush and an unidentified bush that we liked, so we kept. The planted azaleas and gardenias are barely visible along the inside edges of the beds. They all got fried in our brutally hot and dry July. Four of the six gardenias have bounced back nicely. I think the other two are toast, but we'll see if anything happens this spring. The four azaleas lost all of their leaves, and look like they're in better shape than the two iffy gardenias, but they're all on the iffy list until this coming Spring.