Spring means no rest till the tilling’s done

(COLUMN) — Dan and Jody Spark write every week for The Armchair Mayor News about life on their small acreage./

“Spring came with blustering winds and torn clouds of rain and for Wang Lung the half-idle days of winter were plunged into long days of desperate labour over his land.”
— The Good Earth by Pearl S. Buck

Every spring there is a plot of land on my property that gets tilled in preparation for the planting of corn, potatoes, wheat and peas.

It’s about a quarter of an acre and it’s all done by rototiller. Needless to say, after the last foot of dirt is turned over, raked of weeds and seeded by mid-May, dreams of winter’s idleness slowly and cruelly start to blossom.

Hard, physical labour has always been something I have craved due to some masochistic quirk in my body’s makeup. But rototilling 11,000 square feet of sod while constantly stooping to pull weeds from the tines, digging down at least two feet to pull the roots of clover and wrestling with the mechanics of the tiller can, admittedly, take its toll.

Those who have run a marathon will know what I mean. Anyone who has been crazy enough to lace up their shoes to run 42.2 kilometres in one shot will speak of hitting that point in the race — usually around the 30-kilometre mark — where they start to question their sanity. Silent vows are made to never run another marathon, but the moment that finish line is crossed, all is forgotten and plans are already in the works for the next one.

Such is farming. As the hot, dusty work of fall comes to an end and winter finally brings a merciful end to the labour, March’s warm weather creates a blinding anticipation of outside work. And although I may not be a real farmer, it’s at this time of year when I can sure complain like one.

Of course, when one puts the hyperbole in check, it really isn’t that bad. While I still get confused looks by motorists driving past the quarter-acre plot and the odd comment from someone telling me, with a smirk firmly planted, that they have tractors for this kind of work, it’s at times like these when I’m glad to not be sitting in front of a computer.

Slowly, I take the rototiller in a decreasing spiral around the plot that supposedly gets smaller after each pass, although, there are times I have my doubts. Granted, if I had a better tiller, like one where the tines are in the rear of the machine like smart gardeners have, the process would probably go a lot smoother.

But with the tines in the front, I only go a foot at a time, oscillate the tiller horizontally to grind down into the soil, and when I’ve sufficiently hit the low point — literally, and perhaps, figuratively — I lurch the tiller ahead for the next foot. With the help of several jerry cans of gas, I do this roughly 11,000 times. It sucks.

Still, while my trusty rototiller may be small and inefficient, at least I have a machine to help me with the work. I could be out there with a hoe. Or, even worse, be like O-lan, the faithful wife of Wang Lung in The Good Earth (a must-read novel by Pearl S. Buck), who dutifully helps her husband in the field only hours after giving birth. With no complaint!

The hard work and struggle over that small plot on the southernmost tip of my property hardly seems worth it, and it isn’t. I grew a decent amount of wheat last year, but my ineffective threshing methods ground me down. The peas were so tangled with weeds, I hardly had any to give to my chickens.

And between my children, who couldn’t resist fresh corn for supper, and my jersey milk cow, which couldn’t resist trampling through the tall stalks, there wasn’t one grain of corn left for the chickens.

While the potatoes proved their worthiness (1,300 pounds can provide a lot of economical meals for a family of six), the quarter-acre will be seeded with field grass this year, which will be cut for hay for my horse.

Of course, more hay means more scything, which means more crazy looks by passersby and more advice on getting a tractor for such jobs.

But as I tell my children, nothing worth doing is ever easy – especially in farming.

Dan and Jody Spark are in their fourth year of living their back-to-the-land dream on their small acreage at McLure and they are having the time of their life.