For the whole time I have lived out here in the Sustainable Living Unconventional Testlab I have had a love/hate relationship with garden tillers. I have a big ol’ rear tine Troy Bilt monster from the 70’s that has lain idle since the first year from mechanical problems and my desire to do everything the hard way like a good hippy should. But, with doom looming so near I said WTF, I gotta get serious about the garden and got the new carb on it so that it ran long enough to shred the old belts. Got new ones, fired it up and a few passes later blew a compression ring. Shit. So I borrowed the neighbors piece of shit front tine tiller, tilled their garden spot first on a sharecrop deal, and beat myself to death manhandling it through all the rocks.
Time passes, the next generation of weeds takes over and it’s now fall garden time. I’m sorry, I’m not in my thirties anymore and it’s hotter than hell out there. I just don’t have enough groovy in me to want to use a turning fork over that much ground when Vole-Mart had a 195cc front tine tiller on sale for 299. I caved.
So I have energy slaves at my disposal now. Half a gallon of gas and maybe an hour’s work and 2000 sq ft of churned dirt is laying there with a “plant me” look. Poof, just like that, right?
I’m not getting into how much work it would take to grow 300 bucks worth of turnips to buy the tiller. Blow jobs at the bus station would be easier than that. Suffice to say that I could have forked up the garden in a couple of eight hour shifts, raked it down to a fine tilth in another eight, whereas a minimum wage quickie mart job would have taken a week and a half to net the cost of the tiller. 60 hours of wage slavery and a couple of gallons of gas ain’t really a bad deal to turn over a 1/4 acre in an afternoon, eh?
So, at best just to “break even” that tiller has to run three more seasons maintenance free plus gas. Hahaha, like we got three years before the paper bags come out on all the gas pumps. That dead 9N tractor behind the barn isn’t going to get an engine kit in it anytime soon either.
comrade simba 
July 26, 2008 at 7:36 am |
Hey, use it while you can! I sure as hell would! And post collapse, I’ll just make the suckers that wanna eat do it! Heh heh heh. Oh wait, I’m one of those suckers….. What I really meant was………
July 26, 2008 at 3:43 pm |
hey im from sw mo barry county and as a fellow preper i like to say hi
email and we can talkmore would like to go to one of the gettogethers in
springfield,mo
July 26, 2008 at 7:51 pm |
Hey maddog – email me csimba at yahoo. It would give me an excuse to go to Cassville and stop by House Handle and get all my dead shovels and rakes new handles. I used to have 100 acres down Thomas Holler outside of Exeter.
July 27, 2008 at 11:16 am |
Comrade,
I think it was 2 summers (maybe 3) ago that we decided that the pure physical demands of gardening by hand was beyond us due to age. I realized I COULD do it but time and wear and tear on us was too much. We got one of those Mantis tillers. Not a bad little machine, works pretty good. I think the tank holds a quart of gas (haven’t measured it and don’t remember what the manual says). One tank will till the garden anyway. Course, we have interesting gound here, friable as hell, no rocks, no clay. Made up of volcanic ash that we are building up to grow something besides pine trees and bitter brush. Doing pretty good on that front with neighbors and pickup loads of grass clippings, compost and manure.
One problem with it though. I wanted to get into the clutch system on it, it is like a chain saw clutch, thought it might be worn enough to need replacement (I was wrong). I simply could not figure out how to get to it. I tried all my mechanic tricks and it defied me. Called the Co. Have to take it to authorized dealer to get into it. lol. Hope it lasts till I die or flat out can’t garden anymore. Anyway, for a relatively inexpensive small tiller, it will churn our dirt up (even with matted grass first time till) down 8″ or so and after the first trip through, rather quickly too. Small enough to plan out garden where can go between rows or beds for weeding. Never failed to start, and is light in weight.
I figure that a complete collapse will take away a lot of ability to use things like this due to unavailability of gas. But, for anything less than complete collapse, I can keep the tiller and chain saw working at $20/ gal gas.
Hadn’t noticed before, you are around Springfield, MO? Go almost straight SO. of Springfield into Ark and that is where I tried the whole primitive living deal in the 80’s, the Mount Judea area of Newton County.
July 27, 2008 at 3:07 pm |
Yeah, murph, those mantis tillers are cool. I’m just going to stay happy with the 12″ front tine dirt churner for bed preparation and path clearing.
I’m in McDonald county, Mo, in the sw corner. West of Anderson.
July 28, 2008 at 12:40 pm |
This is the main reason I wanted a pig. I hope they’ll
til for me.
July 28, 2008 at 7:54 pm |
They really do a number on grass and weed roots. Pack down the soil unless you get a good rain and pull them off right after they root it all up. Once it dries out they will pack it down in short order so timing is everything.
July 30, 2008 at 6:27 pm |
I thought I was being so eco-snobby when I did all the new patches this year by hand. No, they were not large, but large enough. Raspberry, blackberry and blueberry patches and a small experimental garden plot. I decided to take the sod off the garden patch by hand first and then till it. I had a place on the other side of the property where there was once gardening and I wanted it to be grass for the future chickens. So, all the sod moved. I’ll tell you, I’m not looking forward to next year when I do it all again. I’m not a young man either, so I look at this as a way to keep up. I figure if I can do all this now while I work as a slave for the man, I’ll have no trouble when I retire (IF I retire). Just a garden spade, a shovel and a fork. Lots of stuff growing out there pretty free of weeds. Doesn’t take more than an hour a week to keep the weeds down and maybe a bit more to water it if the sky doesn’t do it for me. I think the tiller is a good idea, if, for no other reason, than to start things off. Maintenance is easier than tilling. I say keep tilling the gas runs out and then do it by hand. I’ve looked at those Mantis things and wondered if they’d stand up to the New England potato (AKA rocks). That is why we have so many stone walls up this way. Still, once it was set up, those things look like they’d make short work of things. I just worry I’d be distracted for a second and I’d turn around to see my squash plants spinning around.
July 31, 2008 at 10:24 am |
Hi Simba, nice to see ya have your own blog now! I didn’t know, you should have put a shout out via TOD or Survival Acres or something.
I’ve added you to my daily reading.
Great points regarding the absolute back-breaking labor required to do it the non energy slave way, one key reason our ancestors lived such shorter lives (46 years was average in 1900).
-fallout11
July 31, 2008 at 2:54 pm |
Hey Simba, enjoy your blog. The first year I planted my garden, my son and a couple of friends rented a big tiller and rode that sucker to death tilling a space for me. It looked like so much trouble for such a little garden, I’ve pretty much done what I do to it each year by hand since then. This year, we’ve had so much rain (as you know), the main hard work has been trying to keep ahead of the Bermuda grass and keeping the squirrels from climbing the tomato cages to see if they’re ripe yet. No small feat at my age, but it’s beginning to pay off. Over all, it doesn’t look like it’s going to be as productive as last year, but I won’t starve. (Especially since I do love squirrel stew.)
Do keep up the good work here on your blog and I hope we can all get together next year again.
Linda
July 31, 2008 at 7:28 pm |
I really liked what the poster said about still being able to keep the tools running at $20/gal. That’s actually a good thought; for me the return is similar. I hope to stave off the backbreaking part until the absolute bloody end 😉