My neighbour Dave and I both love gardening. We have large garden plots just over the escarpment from Toronto in the Halton Hills area. Come spring, summer and fall, it’s time to clean and rototill the garden. We love our rototiller almost as much as the garlic we plant each fall. Next year’s crop of cloves can still go in the soil, as long as the ground is workable. Late October to early November usually works.
In the early 1980s, I rented a rototiller from Mike, the owner of the local hardware store. Prior to this I would have the local farmer come over with his plow and a load of manure for a little garden tune-up. He’d go up and down a few times and voila! My plot was done. I still import sheep manure but, like most people, I wanted to do the garden on my own terms and have my own equipment.
One day, around 1984, I asked Mike if he’d sell me one of his rental machines. “Sure,” he said. “See me in the fall.” Later that season, I was the proud owner of a well-used but reasonably new MTD-brand rototiller with a Briggs-Stratton engine. (I still have the owner’s manual and invoice). Self-sufficiency, here I come. I paid a few hundred dollars for my new workhorse. I don’t recall how I got the beast home. It’s a two-person job lifting and moving it. It would have helped to have had a truck. I stored it in the back shed next to the chicken coop.
Using a rototiller is still hard work, but it sure beats a pitchfork. It certainly helps to get your garden ready for planting vegetables and keeping the weeds at bay, and it makes the garden look nice. For the rest of the 1980s, it was open the choke and one pull of the ripcord away from ignition. Since then, it has always jumped to life on the first yank. A little gas here, a little oil there. Incredible. There are two icons on the lever for speed—a rabbit and a tortoise. I usually have it on rabbit.
Then, one spring, I was talking with my gardening friend and neighbour Dave. “How do you like your rototiller?” Dave asked. “It’s great,” I told him. Without missing a beat I said, “Would you like to borrow it?” After all, that’s what neighbours are for. “That would be great, thanks,” he said. Dave had a pickup truck, making it easy to transport, and a barn for storage. He lives about a kilometre down the road. Dave has better fortune with peppers and eggplant than I do. He always gives us a few too late in the season. Now the old rototiller was doing double duty—it commandeered two gardens in the spring and the fall, as well as some mid-season tilling to manicure the garden. From year to year, that old rototiller just kept working.
My partnership with Dave grew until we became co-owners. Dave would use his truck and we’d take it to a guy in town for the odd repair job and oil change after gardening season. On the count of 1-2-3, we’d heave ho the machine into the back of his truck, using our hands to grip the tines. Splitting the maintenance cost made it easy. At one point, we had to replace the carburetor. Another time, one of the drive belts needed fixing. No problem. No big expense. Just a short pit stop, and it was back on the road.
Our spring ritual, and a welcomed one, has been the sharing of the rototiller, the tilling of two family gardens and the visions of eggplants, potatoes, garlic, onion, peppers, tomatoes and a variety of other crops to sustain us through the seasons ahead. Our families grew up. The kids all left. But Dave and I stayed. He has lived here for more than 40 years in the same stone farmhouse.
I’ve been here for more than four decades, too. The gardens have kept growing. The rototiller has kept purring. (Okay, not exactly true—not quite a “purr.” I wear protective equipment over my ears.) Through the 1990s and the 2000s, the old MTD
kept churning up the soil.
Fast-forward 40 years, and that old rototiller is still working. It never complains. Doesn’t use much gas. Like many other machines, you can now get an electric rototiller. It has served us well by paying for itself time and again. It competes with my mother’s old electric stove (an Eaton’s Viking model) for longevity (but even that stove—and Eaton’s—are now history).
Nowadays, built-in obsolescence seems to be commonplace with appliances and equipment. Not with our rototiller. It came from good stock. In a very small way, we have helped reduce our carbon imprint by communally sharing garden equipment.
The hardware store has since moved and changed ownership. The farmer up the road moved away and I hear he passed. They paved our gravel road. Another line of towers grace the hydro corridor the next line over. Even Dave has decided to go with a new rototiller.
Change is constant. Thank goodness some things don’t change—like a dependable rototiller. Rest well in the shed ol’ roto. You’ve earned it. See you next spring.
