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[Clansgian AT wmconnect.com]

> >I've owned and ruined several rear tine tillers.  The guards they put on 
> the rear tine tillers trap rocks and it ends up destroying the tiller. 
> I realize that rear tine tillers are easier to walk through, but would a 
> front tine tiller be better in soil where rocks are present?  

Good answers on this already.  But I'd have to say I've had the same 
experience as Bev, even on very heavy duty tillers and expensive tillers.  
Yes, before 
I knew better, I used some monster tillers, some I owned and some I rented.  
When I first got this place I decided to break ground for the garden in my 
selected spot and rented a monster Troybuilt.  The ground (around here most 
of 
the bottoms are old glaciers) was so rocky that I gave it up and moved the 
garden.  There the problem Bev reports was even worse because the rocks were 
farther in between.  You'd be tilling along and then "chunk!" a fist sized, 
or two 
fist sized, rock would be lifted up by the counter rotating tines and jambed 
between the housing and tines or side of the tine transmission and the tine.  
Many times I had to get a 1" piece of rebar and a drill hammer to get the 
rock 
loose and sometimes I had to take the pins out of the tines and remove them 
to 
get the rock out.  In at least one case repeated lock ups from the rocks beat 
the bearing race beyond use.

My lesson with rototillers came from a time when I was a devotee of Bro. John 
Jeavons and had double dug one of the beds with their underlying clay of my 
new garden and was worn out from the effort and I was wearing a much younger 
man's boots at the time!    So I came up with a brillilancy!  I rototilled 
the 
next bed, 4' wide so in two passes, to 9" deep or so and then shoveled the 
very 
loose dirt out to the right of the bed onto the path.  Then I tilled the 
underlying soil another 9" deep and shoveled that out to the left side of the 
bed. 
 Then I tilled another 9" down in the ditch and then loosed the bottom of 
that a bit with the fork.  I put back the second layer and then the first.  
On 
one of the beds I put down potato pieces before putting back the top layer.  

Ha!  Yes indeed, stabbing the bed with a shovel sent the shovel 24" deep in 
the very loose ground.  And I got an OK crop with a lot of top dressing of 
manure and compost.

Come the next year and I thrust the shovel into the bed.  It went in about 6" 
and stopped with a "clunk" as it seemed to be hitting a rock.  I tried it all 
over the beds.  Just like a layer of concrete just 6" down.  I dug one up and 
the soil was twice as hard as the undisturbed soil in the beds next to it, 
like adobe, hard as a rock.

I added creek sand and gypsum (old drywall) to one of the beds and repeated 
the bit with the rototiller.  The two other beds, becoming as I was 
unenamored 
with the tiller, I dug up using a mattock and mixed sand and gypsum in with 
them.  

The first bed hardend up nearly as badly as it had the first year.  The other 
two that had not been churned to a froth by the tiller but instread were only 
broken up into chuncks, were still friable all the way to the bottom by the 
next year.

That was 17 years ago and an tiller or other machine has never been in the 
garden since.  

If I were breaking new sod for a garden, I'd plow it with my horse in the 
winter and again in spring.  Lacking a horse, I'd consider using a rototiller 
but 
only to a depth of 4" or so to destroy the growing points of the sod.  I 
think a tiller churns up the ground too much and destroys its structure.

I've gardened with methods of preparing the ground all the way from a 
rear-tine counter rotating rototiller churning the living b'jesus out of the 
soil to 
the no-till (at all) method of just adding compost to the surface.  My very 
clear conclusion is that a somewhat-till method is best.  Now of days I turn 
the 
top 8" or so of each bed with a shovel, just gently turn the soil over a bit, 
and then rake the top 2" of that with a rake.  


James