Beth, if your garden is already tilled, all you need to do is keep it under mulch, putting down wet papers first. Then you just pull back the mulch and plant the seeds or the plants.

If you can find a copy of Ruth Stout's No Work Gardening Book, you will learn lots of good techniques for gardening this way. I do it on part of my garden and I can attest that is works. I even do new plots using her technique which they now call lasagna gardening. For new ground, I begin the fall before and use old feed sacks or whatever paper I have and then flakes of hay. By spring when you pull back that flake, the ground is teeming with earthworms. I was amazed the first time I did it.

The hardest thing will be finding a good supply of mulch if you live in the city.

Or if you have a small garden, a spading fork would be all you need plus a good garden hoe for weeding.

Good luck.

glenda

Like Glenda said mulching works well. And you can use a spading fork in the area where you will plant if needed. No need to spade the whole garden. I just do the area where the seeds will be planted. One width of the spading fork is wide enough. Jay

Beth,

As Glenda and Jay stated, rototilling is not necessary, although it is speedy. To the extent that you need to turn over the soil at all, you can use a good sturdy spade and do it by hand. (It is great exercise and really builds back, shoulder and arm muscles!) You really don't have to rototill at all. In the Ruth Stout No-Work Mulch Gardening Book, I think (it's probably been 15 or 20 years since I read the book) Ruth said she just piled up mulch 12" deep and never rototilled. As the mulch decomposed, it was partially carried down into the soil by rainfall, earthworms, etc. and partly mixed into the soil when she set out transplant using a trowel.

There are, in fact, some good reasons not to rototill. One is that every time you turn over the soil, you expose millions of weed seeds to sunlight and all that many of them need to induce germination is a fraction of a second of sunlight. The more you rototill, the more weeds you'll see.

Secondly, if you use the same rototiller repeatedly and you always till at the same depth, that can cause a layer of hardpan to form just beneath the tilling depth and that hardpan can impede water drainage and plant root growth.

Third, as mulch and other organic matter decomposes, it forms its own structure and gives your soil good texture. (Picture something light and airy like angel food cake with lots of air holes between soil particles.) When you rototill, you destroy that structure and lose a lot of the air holes. You fluff the soil up with the rototiller but then it packs down sort of like flour packs down into a bag/sack or canister. So, you actually have better soil structure with less or no tilling.

The lasagna gardening books by Pat Lanza are just a fancier version of Ruth Stout's method and with them no tilling is a part of the philosophy of building lasagna beds. However, if you have bermuda grass you do need to remove it before building a lasagna bed on top of it.

There are other options--you could rent a tiller although I hate the thought of the expense of doing that. You could try to barter with someone who has a rototiller--maybe bartering a home-cooked meal or a month's supply of homemade bread or X amount of babysitting hours, etc. in exchange for having someone come over and rototill the garden plot. If your garden plot is fenced-in and you know someone who'd loan you a pig, you could put a pig inside the garden plot and it would turn over that soil in no time at all. Or, if you could trap a couple of armadilloes and turn them loose in your garden, they'd rototill it up for you. OK, that last suggestion wasn't really a serious one.

Watch Craigslist and Freecycle sites for people giving away tillers or for people offering to rototill gardens for a small amount of money. You never know.

Not having access to a rototiller is not the worst thing in the world, unless you have very dense hard clay that is hard to work with handtools. I can only work our dense clay soil with hand tools when it is moist. When it is dry, trying to dig in it is like trying to dig concrete.

I hope you find a solution that works for you.

Dawn

Beth, If you have children they can help. When Dh and I moved to our current location, we had no tiller and no money to hire the garden plowed. The older children were 8 and 13, the baby 1/1/2. Dh took a shovel to our new garden spot--a former fescue/johnsongrass/bermuda grass pasture--and gave the kids and me hoes and rakes. We built our first 1,000 sq ft of garden the hard way, digging out all those roots and pulverizing the earth with our handtools. And since we started it in late April, planted only warmseason crops the first year. Since your ground has already been tilled--last year, I assume--perhaps you could just use an earth fork to loosen it as you need to plant each crop, and then mulch to keep it loose. Good luck with it.

All good advise! We have a smaller, front tine, tiller. I don't believe I used it last year. I only use it when in a real pinch, and then I tell myself not to do that again! I not only have a great spading fork, which I purchased from Lee Valley Tools, but also use two different size mattocks. They are extremely useful.

Last year I purchased not only that great spading fork, but also two Japanese draw hoes. One is full sized, and the other is a hand tool. They are FANTASTIC tools! I was working an area of the garden with the full sized one, just the other day. It makes very fast work of weed removal, especially when the soil is moist. I'd take these tools over a rototiller, any day.

If someone wanted to give me a really nice rear tine, heavy duty roto tiller, I wouldn't complain. But I'm not about to go out and buy one.

George
Tahlequah, OK

Here is a link that might be useful: Japanese Draw Hoe/ Lee Valley Tools

George, thanks for posting the name of Lee Valley Tools! I have been wracking my brain for their name. That is where I bought my spade and fork. They are a good company to do business with.

Now...in defense of tillers. I do have one and have had it since 1976. I have jokingly told people that I would give up DH before I would that tiller! I know my soil is quite different from most of yours, but I can break sod in new ground with that little thing. It is a 3.5 hp Merry Tiller, front tines. When I bought it the gentleman told me I would be able to operate it with one hand when I got old. I didn't pay much attention to him (remember, it was 1976). He told the truth; I am older (OK old); and I can.

I understand they are no longer the same machine or the same company. Sad.
glenda

Dorothy,

That's a good point about having the kids help.

George,

I'm glad you're enjoying your Lee Valley tools. If there are better tools available in this country, I don't think I've ever seen them. (I do think that perhaps some of the tools available from Johnny's Selected Seeds might be comparable in quality, but I haven't used any of them so that would be just a guess on my part.)

Glenda,

It sounds like you have a wonderful tiller. We have used our rear-tine tiller many times to break new ground, but we also have accomplished the same thing with serious hand-digging. The combination of bermuda grass in heavy red clay soil at our house is a vexing one. If the clay is too wet, it has the consistency of really thick pudding or maybe wet concrete and you can't dig or rototill it at that time....and then when it dries, it is like dry concrete. For us, the biggest challenge in breaking new ground is that we have to do it when the soil moisture levels are 'just right'.

We do have a narrow band of sandy soil that cuts north-south across our property. It is only 40' wide at its widest point and most of it lies under a large pecan tree, but a few feet of my veggie garden's western edge is in that sandy soil and digging or tilling that soil is a dream. I'd never cut down that pecan tree, but if it ever dies, I'd secretly rejoice, knowing that I could use enlarge the garden into that sandy area.

My dad had a very old Sears Craftsman rototiller that he used until he was about 70 years old....and then he gave it to my brother when my brother moved to acreage in the country and was trying to break up caliche clay soil and put in a garden. I bet that tiller was 30 years old by then and it worked as well as any tiller could in rocky soil. I doubt any of us could buy a rototiller nowadays and expect it to last 30 years or longer...they just don't make things to last the way they used to. (Well, Lee Valley does, but most companies don't.)

And now, since we've mentioned Lee Valley, I'll link their webpage for everyone else. Those of you who've never seen the Lee Valley Tools website or catalog will be shocked at their prices, but all I have to say about that is that you get what you pay for, and if you buy Lee Valley Tools, they'll last you a lifetime.

Dawn

Here is a link that might be useful: Lee Valley Tools

Thanks for your thoughts on this everyone! I just needed to look at it differently! I've got strips of that rubber matting I got from that old daycare over the areas I had tilled last year, and I put more strips out today to smother the winter weeds to make my job a bit easier when spring comes. I do have some areas tilled, but am expanding... so it looks like I'll have my work cut out for me. My oldest will help me, with alot of arm twisting, LOL! My husband says we have sandy loam soil, but he hasn't seen the chunks of clay I've come across in my digging!

I do have a fork (spading fork?) that I can use... but I'll need to get a better hoe than I have. PROBLY won't be the Japanese Draw hoe... even tho I love that! Maybe that'd be a good Christmas present for me.

Dawn,
The pig idea made me giggled, the armadillos made me actually laugh out loud, LOL!

Thanks again everyone! I feel better about the garden this year. :)

Beth

I have a 6' tiller that I use behind my tractor. The first two years here I thought I could not live without it. Now I have decided that I probably don't need it. It has caused lots of problems because of my heavy soil and the amount of rain we have had the last few years.

I could use a small walk-behind now I think.

You can find mulch in a city. I live in the country and I get bagged leaves and grass clippings in the summer from town (worry that some may use herbicide). I am still hauling bagged leaves in that I piled at my friend's house. You ask a friend or neighbor who takes the newspaper to save paper for you. Put the paper down with leaves on top. You could put a thin layer of dirt or straw on top. My mother read Ruth Stout; Ruth had the same problem as you do. The Lasagna garden lady also uses a similar method. Could you tactfully ask if they are selling his tiller? He got you into gardening so I think you could phrase it nicely.

I do have about five bags of leaves I bagged up at the beginning of fall, so there's that! My dad takes the paper, so I'll give him a call and have him save them for me. He'll be happy to do that.

Helen,
I would ask them, but it's an expensive tiller. I'm not sure of the type, but my dad called it a Cadillac of the tiller world. No way I'd be able to afford it.

Beth

I would ask them anyway. If they knew he helped you, they might give you a good deal. You may know the people and have a better view of the reality.