Spade work getting too much these days...

[Brendan W]

I have big plans for the garden now that the new road is not going to take our house.
Said plans need a lot of spade work and I'm not fifty anymore.
Spent two hours today before the rain for a fairly small return.
Anyone any advice on motor tillers.
Not doing large areas and mainly taking old lawn back to fruit and veg. Typical plot sizes forty square yards at a time.
Soil is clay and heavily thatched.
Things I'm looking at are hp, width, front or back tines, self propelled and cost in the hundreds

[Cipher]

I have a 1983 troy bilt horse 8 HP briggs and stratton. its rear tine and to be frank a front tine would kill a person. As it is in deep hard clay the tiller al most kills me every year. Its a full body workout.
I paid 400 bucks of it at an estate sale and it is a joy. It does in half an hour what would take the better part of a day to do with a shovel.
Do not get a front tine two stroke chinese crap tiller you'll regret it.

[LAB3]

A local teen, a digging fork, a couple of pints and some walking change.

Does anyone nearby rent tillers out? Don't forget you have to store it and maintain it too.

How about a local that hires himself and his tiller out? There's gotta be guys needing quick cash that could pull that off.

We'll talk soil if you want but only if you ask.

[Brendan W]

Thank you both for responding.
Local company can hire a heavy duty rear tine. I have a few Chinese saws that got dropped in here after the owner got tired and figured I might get one of them going. Figured if I have an XL-12 still running I might know a thing or two. The Stihl is starting to look cheap
Talking of soil. I am thinking you are thinking maybe mycelium destruction and no till is a better option ?
Mary Reynolds lives close and she has become a guru type figure for me. She describes herself as a reformed landscape designer and asks that we let gardens become what they want to become.

https://marymary.ie/

[Cipher]

There are no doubt kinder methods than tilling. Black cloth left on ground over winter forces death and breakdown of plantlife.
Some folks I know start a bed by laying down trucked in topsoil in the summer then cover this over winter and spring to kill the weeds below.

I have a friend who had a rich soil half acre of land. Alluvium from floods. a Bogan almost. He used his tiller to plant a vegetable garden without paying heed to the depth of the rich top layer of soil.
Let the machine go full depth c 8 inches or so iirc. All the damn fool did was average out 3-4 inches of organics into the subsoil. pulled up subsoil of sandy pebbly material.
ruined the damned field for years.

I use mine in an ongoing struggle to single handedly and cheaply amend the clay soil in my yard. Its an acre or so of clay. I am building swales which I may convert to proper drain tiles.
I have turned a large volume of tree leaves into the low spots and it actually has served to assist in drainage.

[LAB3]

I'm very much of the Bill Mollison Permaculture persuasion of "use what you've got, where you got it" as well as the original Rodale inspired "Grow soil, not plants" philosophy.

Mollison would tell you to get something growing on it as a cover crop to dig into the soil to add organic matter. In one of his sketches he proposed growing Daikon Radish in clay/harpan soils letting them break up the concreted subsoil, then you merely leave them in the ground to rot. I'm betting that some sort of perennial rye would do well digging it in when it gets 4-6" tall and then reseeding.

As to Rodale the "double digging" method of incorporating organic matter as you refill the trenches you've dug is the way I set my place up and my customers that had poor soil. In this case you'd need to bring in organic matter so it becomes a matter of what's available to you and at what price. A lot of cities are making yard waste compost these days to keep that material out of the landfill. Peat moss could also work but tends to acidic and awfully ecologically destructive. See what's available at your local nursery and go from there.

https://www.finegardening.com/articl...ally%20removed.

https://sowrightseeds.com/blogs/planters-library/daikon-driller-as-a-cover-crop

[Brendan W]

I have a lot of organic material in the garden and can get unlimited amounts of seaweed at the shore.
Local contractors have any amount of sifted topsoil with organic added at prices that surprised me compared to rotavator hire.
It's time for the cardboard, mulch and topsoil and then seed bombs.
I have a steep slope and if I get the beds right I should have some swale effect happening.
This won't be quick but at least I can see a way forward without breaking up the ground.
I gave up mowing two years ago, settling for an annual scythe cut.
Moving to productive or at least native sympathetic beds sounds so much better to me than pointless grass.

[LAB3]

I've never had to deal with hard soil since the majority of the work I've done was in an area of glacial till, coarse sand and very fine grave so for us the problem was water retention. What work I'd done in urban farming the problem wasn't so much the soil itself but the fact that much of the area was reclaimed swamp land, drainage was the issue there with a hardpan layer about two feet down that kept the water from draining downward.

I've seen but never tried the method you're describing of covering the soil and adding new soil over the top so I cannot comment on how that works and doesn't work. My only concern with that method would be how deep the roots would be able to go. If you where putting in an annual flower bed or some form of ground cover such as Lamium, Myrtle or English Ivy there's probably no reason it wouldn't give you good results.

[Cipher]

Grass is a foolish waste of resources. It hilarious how folks want carpet. Or Kentucky blue grass.
I don't like the cardboard lasagna thing. Seems trendy nonsense. Takes an age to rot.

[JMHJ]

No front tines. Wouldn't ever buy one of those again. Did it when I was a kid, and did it when we moved to this house getting on toward 20yrs ago. It'll wear you out and they get nowhere. I saw a new rear tine model some weeks ago of the brand I last had - $800 usd. Probably low end.

Don't know anything else about them, like are they self-propelled or not, or some yes some no? There was a retired guy had a 2 1/2 acre plot next to us 40 years ago, and he gardened essentially the whole thing with a rear tine. That was probably a good one...

[LAB3]

There was a retired guy had a 2 1/2 acre plot next to us 40 years ago, and he gardened essentially the whole thing with a rear tine. That was probably a good one...

There was a guy who was known as Tom the Tillerman near us who had a 1940's era Lombardini rear tine tiller with single cylinder diesel engine on it which drove both the tines and the drive wheels. It had a seat attachment with two tall wheels on it that he could attach when doing long rows like that. I'd bet a new rig like that would cost a pretty penny these days!

I'm not "anti till" as much as I'm anti-waste-money. If you have that much field to work then it makes sense but if all you have is a postage stamp to work then why put the money into a piece of equipment you're only going to use for 20 minutes once or maybe twice a year? Better off hiring that out.

That's why I like the double dig method. Sure it's a lot of hard work but you only have to it once! Even if you pay a couple of guys it's gonna be cheaper than buying, storing and maintaining a tiller with much better results plant wise.

[JMHJ]

Gave my front tine away some years back. Neglected to keep Stabil in it or run the gas out or start it frequently or something and it would only run on starter fluid when last I tried it. Easy fix prob (carb clean). Very low hours (lol). Prob did myself a favor getting rid of it.