Making a Garden!!!

The mind can easily be deceived, and I'm doing my best to remember that.  For, you see, the temperatures we have been enjoying are telling me it's summer!!!  But my better self tells me that we are only a couple of weeks away from our first frost according to historical averages!!!

So how long to enjoy my ever-producing garden while making sure I don't get boxed in by winter?!

I finally decided to till up my pepper plants, and wow, what a year I had with those!  These plants gave me well over 200 peppers this year!  And Mom learned a new green pepper soup that has won over my heart (along with Dad's!).  So it was with sorrow that I tilled them under.  But I decided to leave up my tomato plants that still have TONS of life left on them!

But I went ahead and decided to move over my strawberries to the new house.  So first and foremost, I decided to try out a new purchase from a couple of months ago.  I had seen a rare black Troy-Bilt tiller for sale on craigslist, and I had my dad pick it up for me for $300.  And ever since then, it has just sat in the new garage!  Well, today, I decided to fire it up!

Annnnnnnnnd it wouldn't start.  I pulled, and I pulled, and I pulled, and I pulled, and I got nothin'.  My starter fluid was over in the other house, so I decided to try a little lubricant spray.  I was able to get it to sputter, but it still wouldn't start.  And then in what was LITERALLY going to be my last pull, it fired right up.  Unbelievable.  But it ran fine after that!  Oh, engines.

I had a bit of a difficult time figuring out where I wanted my new garden in the massive backyard (especially with an odd tree back there), but I finally decided it would be right in the middle.  The rest of the yard is either too close to the deck or too much in the shade from the pine trees.  I was nervous about tilling up the soil, as Dad and I encountered sooooooo many rocks in our digging up of the fence posts, but I was happy to learn that the soil was black on black.  And the tiller was a champ!  It has counter-rotating tines, so it never once jumped on me on top of the untilled earth!  I had it tilled up in no time.

The new garden.  I have a VERY strong feeling this will grow in size.

The "new" tiller had no problem in the new soil!

Ready for spring plants next year!