Garden setback

This will, hopefully, someday, be a bountifully fertile 40′ x 40′ (1/8 of an acre, approximately) vegetable patch: 

However, there has been a significant setback to the plan. On Saturday we stopped by the Fearsranch to borrow a rototiller. It’s a good, old, solidly built two-tine Troy-Bilt tiller. As predicted by my friend Alan at the market, it is unfortunately not up to the task of chewing through 25+ years of field grass root mass.

This is the result of almost 3 hours of tilling:

So I have to figure out what to try next. Options include stripping off the sod by hand, begging a local farmer to till for me with real equipment, renting a much larger, more powerful rototiller, or gardening in raised beds rather than digging. The eventual solution may well be a combination of these.

In other gardening news, yesterday I spent a Home Depot gift card we got for a housewarming gift on a wheelbarrow. It’s a lovely wheelbarrow – thanks Ceri & Scott!

In non-gardening news, I went to my first local quilting guild meeting last night. It seems like a really good group. It’s a relatively young guild – The Highland Quilt Guild (Maxville) was only formed a couple of years ago, but has approximately 25 members. I liked that the meeting was structured and well run, but informal enough that members were speaking up and making jokes throughout. I met Francis, who lives on my road (which now means I’ve met everyone who lives on the road except for one house, which I think is a “country cottage” rather than a full-time residence), and Brenda who lives one road over, and whose husband hays the field next to ours.