Choosing the Right Tiller

Image Gallery Neil Soderstrom

I have to admit, the close relationships I've had with tillers through the years were not all happy affairs. Some included regular Saturday night fights (the half-ton draft animal that hated to start), while other seemingly committed relationships drifted into distant indifference (the front-tined crawler I eventually traded for a food dehydrator).

A few years ago, after breaking too many start cords on a cranky antique with a bad carburetor (it came with the house), I finally did what I should have done years earlier. I bought a tiller that I truly enjoy using.

But I shall not launch into a brand-name testimonial. My gardening life is mine, yours is yours, and the chances that we'd find happiness with the same tiller are pretty darn slim. Instead lets look at the makings of a good fit between garden, gardener and tiller. Get that three-way match right, and you can almost feel your soil smiling under your feet.

BY THE NUMBERS

The size of your garden is a fair starting point for determining your tiller needs. According to most tiller manufacturers, small gardens of less than 1,500 square feet can be worked with a mini-tiller ($200 to $350). Medium-sized gardens are manageable with a 5- to 6-horsepower tiller ($500 to $800), and big gardens of more than 5,000 square feet call for a tiller with at least a 6-horsepower engine ($800 to $2,000).

Of course there's a lot of wiggle room here, which is good because garden soil comes in many different types, and gardeners themselves come in many different sizes.

Very hard or rocky soil is difficult to work with a lightweight or undersized tiller, which will often skip over a tough spot rather than digging into it. A big, heavy tiller will do a better job in hard soil, but here I must pause to recommend a good plowing for hard-bottomed garden sites. If you turn your heavy soil with a plow in fall or early spring, your tiller will be much more effective. And you can get by with a smaller tiller, which has certain advantages.

WHERE HAVE ALL THE FRONT-TINES GONE?

Before we go on, let's have a short history lesson: A couple of decades back, the big controversy in tillers pitted traditional front-tined tillers against the upstart design from Troy-Bilt, in which the tines rode behind the engine, on the back. The reartined design has clearly won out, because all of the leading tiller manufacturers have now gone to rear-tined models. (See "Ten True Tillers," Page 86.)

Off to the Races

If you're into tillers and speed, get thee to Emerson, Arkansas, for the World Champion Rotary Tiller Race, part of the Purple Hull Pea Festival scheduled for June 27 and 28, 2003. Expect extreme machines and stiff competition from the Waller Team of Three Creeks, Arkansas. Last year, the Wallers' "Wild Thang" set a new record by tilling 200 feet in 6.34 seconds, which computes to 21.5 miles per hour .