Backbreaker

Michael Erlewine -- Archivist Popular Culture

3 min readJun 11, 2025

By Michael Erlewine

Well, I reached the point of no return with our front garden, the one that gets all the sun. Coming out of winter, the grass overcame the garden soil and was standing about a foot high. It is now or never, time to deal with the unwanted ‘weeds’.

For starters, I spent about two hours on my hands and knees pulling weeds out of the earth, the deep-seated root-balls. It took so much strength-of-grip that after doing that for hours I could not pick up something like a glass of water because my hand wanted to drop the glass.

Well, restoring the garden on hands-and-knees didn’t happen, but the takeaway was it would take a week to dig all the root masses out by hand. And of course, I tried garden rakes, leaf rakes, hoes, horizontal pitch forks, shovels, and about every other tool I could get my hands on. None of them worked well enough to continue. And so, it was back to the drawing board. And forget about the philosophy of not disturbing the earth.

I researched gas, electric (corded and corded) cultivators and tillers, using ChatGPT, GROK, and Google to figure out what might work. I don’t want the mess of gasoline engines, figured out that cordless tiller/cultivators are not powerful enough, even with 20V batteries, which leaves me with a corded machine.

Neither Lowes, Tractor Supply, Ace Hardware, nor Walmart had a corded cultivator in stock. The best any of them could do was several days into the future and I would pick one up at their store. That’s how small our town is. Only, our local Menards had a simple corded cultivator in stock, at $120. That seemed like a bargain compared to weeding grass root-clusters by hand.

I drove out to Menards and bought one on the spot, spent an hour putting the thing together and testing it. It was about as simple as these things came, but it worked and was strong enough to really dig out the weeds to about 8–9 inches deep. I was left with the good earth. I had to rake out many of the weed pieces.

In short, I have been two days at that, also removing a dozen or so large pavers that always managed to teeter-totter when you walked on them, even though I put down and leveled each of them on a bed of sand.

To top it off, I bought a bunch of cedar mulch in 3 cubic-feet bags and now have the cedar mulch several inches deep over the whole front garden.

I have room for a number of additional plants, although I am moving away from annual plants and not only toward perennials, but also to plants native to Michigan, especially prairie grasses.

I have always been partial to the tall grasses like Big and Little Bluestem.