Advice on small tillers

Looking for feedback on small garden tillers. I had a Mantis, which I liked, but gave it to my son for his garden. I have a Cub Cadet with a Honda motor, but that is too big to get down between my already planted rows. Saw a small Honda tiller that looked very similar to the Mantis. Comparisons? Is there another type of small tiller that goes forward rather than having be pulled back? With all the rain we've been having, the soil is very wet and full of freshly sprouted weeds.
Thanks.

Something to think about: a lot of people don't till their soil at all, in order to allow it to build up a capillary system and avoid bringing weed seeds to the surface. I just use a small hoe to weed;
http://www.johnnyseeds.com/p-5493-standard-collinear-hoe.aspx it scratches the surface but that's about all. Tilling often makes the weed problem worse, and we use mulch to discourage the nasty little things, as well.

We used to have a Troy-Bilt but we haven't used it in years.

I gave up tilling my garden along time ago. When I put plants in my vegie garden I use lots of mulch and compost and use a fork or small shovel to work the mulch in some. I loosen the soil a bit where the new plant is going but thats about it. Over the past few years of growing vegies in what use to be construction back-fill, the soil is getting light and brown and things are growing like crazy.
I use a hoe for weeds or just pull them up
I would have to say the money spent on a tiller would be better used on mulch/compost and some good hand tools.
But if you have acres of garden... it might be a different story.
Helen

Thanks for the input. I have too much to hoe by myself. I'm no spring chicken.

I was persuaded by a neighbor with a large garden & a Briggs 4HP tiller. I got one at Loews with a $50 discount - last in the store. Lots of fieldstone and hard ground but it did the trick. It's great for untilled areas. Kicked out all the rocks and no problems except blisters on my hands. There's a HUGE increase in veggie size in the tilled areas. I also tilled in kitchen scraps and good soil (compost). Great results.

Roseone, I'm no spring chicken, either, having been retired for ten years now, and we've got a large garden - about 70 x 80'. We do have a system of paths laid down with landscape cloth and covered with wood chips, so that keeps the planting area smaller, but if I go out in the morning when it's cool, with my hoe, I can usually keep the weeds down so they're manageable. The hoe I use takes almost no strength and easily drags the small weeds out. But we have very sandy soil and that may make a difference. Lots of luck with your garden!

Thanks.

I had a huge Troy Bilt tiller when I lived in south Florida and loved it! It did a splendid job of turning-in the annual delivery of horse manure into the sandy soil.

When I moved here, I purchased a Mantis Tiller. It skipped across this red clay so badly, I put it in the back of the garage and never touched it again!

Now that I have raised beds with lots of organic material, I don't need anything but my trowel to sow/transplant, and "garden bandit" to remove the weeds.

My neighbor's kid has a Mantis, and he used it to till between some garlic rows that I planted in my neighbor's plot. Honestly, I think it was overkill, and it took him longer to cultivate between the rows than it took me to hoe. I am very into tilling to incorporate green manures, so I am not against tilling in general, and I am no spring chicken either, but I use a stirrup hoe to weed and I just plain don't cultivate, period. It is easy to scrape the hoe across the top. I don't use any mulch except the soil itself. Seems like less work to me than handling even a small tiller.

I have a stirrup hoe as well, and I use it for areas with more weeds than my collinear hoe can handle. But what do you do about the weeds, Paracelsus? If I don't mulch I have to be after them constantly, and mulching also keeps them moister.

I have had more problems with weeds when I mulched than I do now that I don't mulch. I used to mulch with shredded bark over cardboard. It did keep down weeds, but I noticed that big weeds would get a pretty solid hold and that it was hard to get them out without messing up the mulch, and sometimes the cardboard would come out also. With no mulch, the weeds are more but very small and easy for me to cut off with the stirrup hoe. This also keeps the top of the soil from crusting, which makes it easier for the rain to get through. People talk about being without mulch drying out the soil, but I have read that what happens is basically the moisture is just farther down, and certainly the plants send roots farther down. I decided to give "dust mulch," as it's called, a try about five years ago, I guess, because I read about how the Native Americans used it, and because my garden was getting just too big to mulch. It was getting to be too much work and too much money. I also just didn't feel good about the embodied energy in the wood chips I was bringing in. I find that I notice more about the plants and their condition when I hoe also. I began by not mulching just one plot, just to see, and using a stirrup hoe. Within a month, I was sold on this method.

That's interesting, Paracelsus. I do notice, though, that the beds that are mulched (I use salt hay, which has no weed seeds) withstand dry periods better. Our soil is very sandy, as I've said, and we can use all the help we can get here.

I can take care of the weeds with my collinear hoe up to a point, and then it seems as though overnight they take off and I seem to be losing the battle. It gets discouraging.

It could well be that different types of soil require different treatments. My soil is very rocky loam--30% rock fragments, in fact. Putting mulch over that just gives weed seeds a good place to sit.:) I do use raised wide beds, but they are not raised with boards or anything, and the only additions I use are green manures and home-made fertilizer along the lines of Steve Solomon's recipe. This technique works well here, and I like it because it's pretty low input. I gardened in south Florida, and a lot of the techniques I use now would not have worked well there because it was almost pure sand and because of the heat. I used a very heavy mulch of shredded cypress over many layers of newspaper, which helped keep the fire ants out of my garden and held moisture in the mulch. The only other way I found to deal with sand is to treat it like the exterior of a flower pot--dig a hole and fill it with real soil. Every place I have lived has presented a different challenge in terms of gardening.

I guess I'm a little confused by this discussion. I was always told that tillers were for deep digging of the soil (4 hp and up, down to 10" or so), while cultivators were the smaller ones such as Mantis, Ryobi were for helping to keep weeds down, shredding the soil (cultivation) for small seeds, mixing, amending, etc.

Anyway, my point, I guess, is that cultivators aren't able to penetrate as far down into the soil as tillers can. So it really depends on what you want to do. My small garden with loose soil reacts well to a small cultivator, but I long ago realized that I couldn't till it with my cultivator. So I generally dig it with a shovel, then use the cultivator to prepare the rows for seeds or small plants. The other garden that I take care of is larger and a clay based soil. For that, we need a tiller. Over a few years of tilling pine bark into the soil, the texture is improving, but it still takes a tiller.

To answer the initial question, I have a Ryobi cultivator while my neighbor has a Mantis cultivator. My Ryobi ignition failed within the first year, just out of warranty, resulting in an $80 repair bill. My neighbor's Mantis is going strong after 5 years. The Ryobi tines are towards the front while the Mantis appear directly under the unit. I think the Mantis can cultivate deeper due to the location of the tines and would have been a better choice for me.

My family has an old 8 hp tiller (Troybuilt). We have trouble controlling it in our clay based soil. I would much rather have a 4hp.

Thank you for your input. I may or may not get another Mantis, maybe a small Honda. In the mean time, I managed to get my big Cub Cadet through most rows where the pervasive crab grass and morning glories were taking hold. I also did as much hoeing as I could manage. I have heavy clay filled with stones and rocks. Will be getting some bales of wheat straw to mulch the tomatoes and summer squash to hold down weeds, retain moisture and keep the mud off my feet when I go out to work, pick or just observe.

Fire ants were massively discouraged by six sheets of the New York Times covered by several inches of cypress, cedar, or eucalyptus. I think it was the smell of the shredded wood. They did not dig up through there,ever, whereas my other technique, sprinkling cinnamon around their holes, would keep them out for a week and then they would come back when the rain would start washing it away. With the newspaper and chips, I was able to actually put out a towel on top of it and lie in the sun without getting eaten by fire ants.

Thank you... I have resisted lasagna bedding as I figured it would be primo real estate for fire ants.

I am confused. I don't have a tiller and have never used one. I have lots of rocks here. My friend has to dig large holes for me to plant roses because I can't penetrate the dirt with the shovel or remove the rocks, they are too heavy. Below a couple of inches of topsoil, the soil is compacted rocks and clay. It feels like hitting concrete. The rocks are mostly but not completely slate. Putting in a post for a hummingbird feeder is a challenge. Digging a hole for one rose could take all day.

I currently have several small gardens and don't want to remove any more grass. I am looking to move into a larger place and will, of course, plant gardens. Is there a tiller that could handle digging in such rocky conditions? Perhaps investing in materials for raised beds is a better solution?

roseone33 - when i had a regular harden i bought a mantis. i found it was good for a garden that was already developed but now very good and trying to clear the soil for a new garden. finally sold it and went in container gardening.

podster, do an experiment with one of the smelly mulches first in a lasagne bed, because some plants do not like to grow through an aromatic mulch.

Do you live near a creek, GardenQuilts? Because when I lived in the hills right next to a creek here, it was just as you describe. Forget about digging any holes. Now I'm in an old flood plain of the Chemung River, and there are a lot fewer rocks, although some of them are fieldstones big enough for me to make a path with. At any rate, I used to rent a big Troy-Bilt tiller before I bought my own Sears. My tiller is not as big as the Troy-Bilt was. If you have a vehicle with a trailer hitch, you can always rent a tiller and see if it can handle what you have. IME, with big rocks you have to not force the tiller into the ground or you will break the tines. Stop it and dig out the rock. Also, if it is skidding along the ground, the tines are set too deep for that pass. You have to make multiple passes. I usually start at the shallowest setting and go over it one inch deeper up to three inches. Any more than that and here I start hitting tree roots. In my old place, I started hitting what looked like pure gravel at that depth. But even when I gardened in beautiful black river bottom dirt, I never tilled very deeply. It was too much extra work and I just didn't see the need.

Quilts, I have some raised beds put in over the years. My Ryobi cultivator works great for them, as they are only about a foot deep, quality soil regularly amended and filled without any rocks. I could not get a tiller in those but the cultivator is ideal.