Here’s a chunk of this year’s tiny garden, looking particularly rough in the harshly slanted evening sunlight. As unlike seeing for yourself as this photo may be, it does accurately capture the wild and not ready look of it all. Lush dandelion, prickly thistle and grass already starting to soar, mixed about with the dry dead stems of last fall’s overgrown then winter-killed weeds—that’s step 1 of hand-prepping the bed, completed. It’s not at all like what the rototiller on the tractor would’ve done.
For this first pass, I used the up-for-anything Valley Oak wheel hoe. It’s probably not intended for hacking through this sort of cover, even so, it does the job amazingly well, moving forward and pulling back, using both sides of the blade to slice through tough spots. The green, intact-looking plants have actually been cut off just below the soil level—a day in the sun and they’ll all be fairly dried out, shrunken and browned. Next step, raking it clear, then, another pass with the wheel hoe. Tomorrow!
