The battlefield is prepared. I borrowed a roto-tiller from my parents and tilled the garden this afternoon. I live across the field from the farm where I grew up. The past few years, I've loaded the rototiller on a truck and unloaded it at my place and then did the loading/unloading thing again when I was done. It's a heavy rototiller and it doesn't like to be loaded. This year I got smarter and I just "drove" it the quarter mile across the field. It's self propelled so it wasn't that difficult to walk behind. I do wish it steared more easily but it was still better than loading and unloading.
The garden's roughly 20ft x 40ft. This size worked last year because I can divide the garden into two 20ft squares and water it with two impact sprinklers each doing a 20ft diameter circle. Actually it's one sprinkler that I move back and forth. And actually it's the diameter of the diagonal of a 20' square which happens to be 1.41 (square root of 2 ) times 20 ft or exactly 28.2 feet in diameter. Credit goes to Pythagoras of course.
The ground's too cold to plant anything now except peas. As I mentioned earlier, I planted a row of vine type peas yesterday and I'll probably do a row of dwarf peas over the next few days but the rest of the garden will sit for a month or so. This will let some of the newly exposed weed seeds germinate and I'll kill them off with a healthy dose of glyphosate before I plant anything. Hopefully this will help to keep the weeds down. Easier to spray now than hoe later.
IRRIGATION
I also had time this afternoon to finally extend my underground drip irrigation to the three new trees I planted a week or so ago. Three new 20' lenghts of poly pipe from the old system to the new with 1/4" drip tubing to each tree. I'll eventually add some sort of drip emitter or mini sprinkler to the tubing at the trees. I've still got to fill in the trenches to cover the poly pipe but that's going to be a lot less work than it was digging the trenches.
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