I finally got the garden tilled up and ready for planting on Friday. Well, I didn’t actually do it this time. I paid a nice local fellow with a tractor to till up the soil for me; it was part of the yard up until then. My little rear-tine tiller would have done fine, but the tractor did a better job in an hour than I could have done in a day. I was very pleased to see that the soil in that part of the yard was a rich dark brown color, a fact that will probably bode well for my garden production.

I already dug my seeds out of the freezer, including mustard and kale, beans, corn, broccoli, carrots, turnips and even parsnips. One of my friends in town here sold me half of his bag of Kennebec seed potatoes. Even so, the soil there kind of looks like it is waiting impatiently for something to be planted, the bare brown soil is in sharp contrast to the surrounding green grass.

With the weather over the weekend, it sure didn’t feel like summer time. With snow blowing and a fire burning, it felt more like the middle of winter.

I always buy my seeds and plants for things like peppers and tomatoes, but I still can remember my grandmother gathering seeds out of tomatoes and cucumbers and starting them in rectangular baking pan in the kitchen. My great grandmother was even more thrifty; she would plant potato peels in the garden. So long as they have an ‘eye’, they’ll produce. The older people had so many thrifty skills that they could share, it’s really a shame that much of their abilities have been lost as they pass from this world.

There are some recipes that my grandmother made that no one in the family knows how to replicate. I can remember about three years ago when I opened the last pint jar of her chow-chow and I thought to myself, “There will never be another.” Although there are many variations and some similar choices for sweet pepper relish, there is no way that there will ever be another as good as hers. Even if it were, it wouldn’t be the same.

My seed collection has been stored in my deep freezer for about a year or even more, with some of my seeds dated “Packed for 2002.” Some folks say they won’t come up after that many years, but I don’t believe it. Maybe I will need to drop three or four seeds to a hole to make sure they come up, but I do that anyway. If they prove right, I guess I’ll wish I’d have listened.

For me, waiting for results is the hardest part of putting in a garden — the dead time in between burying the potatoes and actually seeing the green shoots coming forth from the ground or planting the seeds and seeing the little plants start to grow.

Since this is a new area for me to plant, I figure I better test the soil before I get going to see whether it needs lime or nitrogen or just some old faithful 10-10-10. I have a nice collection of fertilizers in the building in five gallon buckets, including one kind of time release fertilizer and two regular garden varieties. I pulled out the wheel plow last week, the one my grandfather made by bending two aluminum poles and attaching a layoff plow blade and a 25-inch bicycle tire.

The tire has been flat for years, but it still works just fine. I also have the one my daddy used, which has a metal spoked wheel and oak handles.

It doesn’t much matter which one I use, I don’t think I could lay off a perfectly straight row if my life depended on it. As my grandpa used to joke, “You can get more in a crooked row than you can in a straight one.”

I usually draw up a map of where I plan to plant everything, which I can refer to later when the plants start coming up here and there. Something that looks like a beet growing where the corn belongs is likely a weed.

I remember when I was a boy I helped out in the garden. “How can you tell the good plants from the weeds?” I asked.

“If you pull on it and it comes out of the ground real easy, it was one of the good plants,” my daddy said.

It might not make sense, but it does seem true. If garden plants were as tough as weeds, gardeners wouldn’t have anything to worry about. Sadly, it just doesn’t seem to work that way.

I can remember the date we always planted our tomatoes and peppers — never earlier than May 10. That’s the invisible frost line on the calendar that only the foolish or reckless plant before, I was told. Of course, it can also frost after that, as we say a couple of years ago when it came a good freeze in late May. You can only plan for part of the stuff nature can throw at you. If it snows in June, you just have to do the best you can with it and go on.

I am hoping for fair weather later this week so I can at least get some potatoes in the ground. A little cold weather won’t bother them or me, for that matter.

However, most of the fruit trees around were in bloom when the temperatures fell over the weekend. I just hope it didn’t wipe out the entire local crop. I guess we’ll see what happens, especially since we can’t change it for the good or bad.

No matter how many times I go out and run my fingers through warm soil in the morning sun, it never seems to get old. It’s like watching a child smile or an old person dance, it’s fresh every time.

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