Spring Comes with a Pinch of Dread

Will this be the year we rent the rototiller? We have "flower beds" surrounding about half of our yard and every year we start spring with a mad application of Round-Up and pick axes, trying to quash the weeds that have miraculously developed under a winter's worth of snow. A few weekends in March go by (some snowy enough to produce an 8 foot-high snowman) and now in the midst of April I've got crabgrass up to my knees lining the perimeter of my yard. Grrrr. A few soggy onions that we neglected to pick last October are showing new green tops. The fennel that we experimented with last year (a colossal failure, by the way; the plants managed to finally grow big and tall but the bulbs that get harvested when fist-size never grew bigger than Brussels sprouts, and then when I decided that I would simply let the plants go to seed so I could collect the fennel, I discovered that while they smelled like licorice, the seeds tasted like splinters) seems to have resurrected itself. I didn't think it was a perrenial plant but all that green fuzz coming up from last year's dead growth suggests otherwise. And there are about 200 million different weeds that have developed everywhere they find soil. Grrrr again. So while I'm not sure how helpful a rototiller actually will be, I have visions of pepper plants and big red tomatoes and golden mounds of butternut squash pushing up out of dark soil with the help of this marvelous machine. A girl's got to dream, after all.