Tilling Tuesday

Holy balls was that a tough day yesterday. After getting J going with school work I got into the garden and started tilling. I had to do some adjustments to the tiller to get it to work right after the repairs. The main thing was the cable tension for engaging the drive belt was off. Once I had that fixed the tiller ran like it was before the repairs, strong and solid.

I tilled 4 or 5 passes and then used my landscape rake to level out the ridges and humps. This gave me a bit of a break every half hour or so and allowed me the chance to check on the boys. While checking on them I managed to get a loaf of sour dough going in the bread machine. I made sure to set my timer and keep track of the time so I could pull the mixing paddle after the dough got punched down, that way we don't have a big cavity on the bottom of the loaf.

After 2:30pm I had made it through 3 sets of tilling passes and was almost halfway through the 4th when the tiller stopped.

Once again I pulled the belt cover and wheel off and found that the belt had eaten itself pretty well. It was twisted and starting to tear apart.

Now there are a couple of reasons this happened. First was my negligence in tightening the bolt that holds the tension pulley. The middle of the 3 pulleys in the pic. Not being tight allowed the bolt to loosen enough that the pulley wallowed side to side and allowed the belt to eat itself.

Not having a spare belt on hand I called the Napa in Deer Park to our north and they had one in stock that would fit the tiller. Just a 1/2"x53" v belt which is a pretty common belt. @stryeyz was going to Deer Park after work to pick up meat from the shop so she stopped and got it for me.

About 5:15pm she got home with the belt, groceries, and dinner. I immediately installed the belt, adjusted the control wire, and put it back together. I am super happy the belt worked perfectly. I ran inside and shoved food in my face so I could get back to tilling. It took another 2 hours but I managed to get the rest of the main garden fully tilled and raked.

The fence is now up around the entire garden and I am ready to lay out the irrigation lines and then cover in plastic again. Today I am planning on tilling my pole bean garden so I can prep it for planting asap.

Probably one of my busiest times of the year is now and boy is my body feeling it. I am super sore from all the tilling yesterday and I am not going to have much of a reprieve for a while. There is also the squash garden up the road that needs to be finished. I am just hoping that there will be customers to buy my produce this year since all the restaurants and schools are closed.