Picking a small rototiller.
Important Points to Understand
The small tilers such as an electric rototiller, tiller attachments for whipper snippers and mini-machines like the Mantis rototiller work well in a very small set of circumstances.
Rock free soils. These machines are typically not heavily powered so if you’re using them on soil with a lot of rocks, you’ll get a lot of bounce and jarring from them. In other words when they hit a rock -the rock wins.
Breaking through Turf. If you’re looking to actually make a garden in well-established turf, these light machines don’t have the power to physically beat up the turf and make garden soil. You *can* do it with them but it’s very hard on the machine and your body. You are far better to rent a larger machine for the day to do serious garden work.
Clay Soils are tough on tillers at the best of times and smaller units either bog down in heavy clay or bounce around on the top of dried out clay soils.
Small rototillers are advertised as being great for smaller areas of cultivation and for small vegetable garden areas. I don’t know about your perennial garden (or established annual beds) but there’s often not enough space to effectively handle a big hoe between perennials - never mind a bucking bit of machinery that sometimes has a mind of its own.
I know it “looks good” in theory, but in practice a hoe or hand work (or my preference a deep mulch) works much better.
Recommendations:
If you’re building a bed or renovating an established bed after the plants have been removed, it is far cheaper to rent a machine than to own one for once-a-year types of jobs.
Machine maintenance can be a problem with these small engines - sometimes they go - sometimes they don’t. I’ve heard “fans” and “not-fans” of almost all of them. I’ve owned several kinds of small tillers over the years and now use mulch and small cultivation tools on my main perennial beds.
And I’ll rent machinery (that’s maintained and guaranteed to work) when I need some tilling.
Bottom Line:
Unless you have a great many annual flower beds that require a yearly digging, I’d substitute a mulch for weed control along with a bit of hand weeding instead of a small rototiller.
And when I have heavy work or a lot of tilling to do, I rent larger machines to get it done with the least amount of stress on my body because my soils are clearly not rock-free.
Got a Comment about Small Rototillers?
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