little engine – a bcs love letter

Last week I spread 800 lbs of soil ammendments, by hand, in one day, using a coffee can.

I would not recommend this to anyone.

Ever.

But it had to be done. The soil test from the fall came back indicating rather serious acidity. Having a pH reading a little south of seven is desirable for vegetable production, but this was pretty bad. So I got five hundred pounds of high calcium lime through the NOFA bulk order program, as well as two hundred pounds of greensand and 100 pounds of bone char.

As I walked through my Sisyphean task, one coffee can at a time, the soil began to look like the surface of the moon, or a sinister cupcake, pockmarked and powdery, synthetic, suspicious.

It was necessary, but ugly, upsetting. I yearned to see and smell the clean uniform brown of loamy tilled earth, to see the slate wiped clean. So I got to the garden early the next morning and fired up the BCS.

The BCS is made in Italy. Those Italians are very fussy about their terminology and insist that the machine they produce is not a mere rototiller, but is in fact a “walk-behind tractor.” They may be fussy, but they also kind of have a point.

I’m pretty much in love with my BCS 732, and I have little regard for machinery. I don’t drive stick. I didn’t learn to operate a tractor until I’d been farming for five years. I just don’t like machinery, I don’t have an affinity for it, it makes me nervous.

But I feel like the BCS is playing on my team. After reading the manuals and pulling the start cord so hard I fell on my ass, the engine sputtered to life, and it puttered up and down the rows in first gear for hours, churning through chunks of sod and throwing out rocks like a champ. The wheels turn independently, so the turning radius is pretty much zero.

Don’t get me wrong, it was hard. It wasn’t that fun. The handles are awkwardly low and the machine is very heavy, so navigating back and forth across my bumpy uncultivated field was exhausting. But I did it all by my self. I didn’t have to call a man to help me. The field is tilled and I did it on my own. And that, my friends, is priceless.