Special Announcement: I am in love with a rototiller. She is amazing, hardworking, beautiful and has changed my life for the better! Oh, and she’s Italian. All of a sudden the farm went from being totally overwhelming and weedy to a manageable project, a true pleasure to be around. It used to take me a day or two to turn one bed and make it plantable. This always involved a lot of back-breaking digging, scraping, and weeding. But over the past two days with the tiller (lets name her Tilla) I easily made five new beds and am close to finishing five more. In just one day I had three beds of kale planted for summer and I’ll have the squash planted by the end of the week. My upper body is very sore as I am using muscles I didn’t know I had to maneuver her around (she is quite heavy), but its so worth it.
Loading into the Truck to Bring Home
She is a BCS tiller, harvester 722. Different attachments allow me to mow and dig trenches.
Christian turning soil into gold.
Simon taking on the grass with Tilla
This short grass tears up easily with just the tiller attachment. I leave the grass to decompose for a day or two and then go through it again to finish the bed. Driving her takes a little getting used to but once you understand the levers, you let off the clutch and let it do the work for you. There is a bit of steering needed as it has a mind of its own: veering off course whenever it hits a dip or bump, leaving the driver to wrestles it back on track which makes it a true upper body workout.
Another exciting benefit to tilling the beds: the gopher holes that have taken over the farm are quickly demolished, allowing the plants a head start to the gopher invasion. Between the tiller and the gopher traps I plan to keep them at bay.
Gopher Trap
I found this guy warming up under plastic mulch that I was using to keep the thistles from sprouting.
