Digging Into the Uses and Benefits of a Rototiller for Landscaping

Highlights

• A rototiller can help break up soil and turn it over for fresh planting.

• A small rototiller, or cultivator, is great for weeding and working in compost and other soil additives.

• Using a rototiller too often can harm your soil’s health, so only employ it as necessary.

What Is a Rototiller Used For?

A rototiller will take the place of various manual gardening tools, such as hoes and spades, to break up soil and turn it over for fresh planting. Homeowners and pros also use it to tackle weeds. Depending on its size, gasoline or electricity powers the rototiller, and it breaks up the soil using large, rotating blades.

Properly breaking up compacted soil is essential to your garden’s success. A tiller can help you work in compost or fertilizer, and the tilling process adds oxygen to the soil, boosting helpful organisms’ growth and ensuring your plants thrive. In addition, it can disrupt the lives of pest larvae living in the ground, preventing big outbreaks in your garden.

There’s no need to purchase a rototiller; you can rent one from many hardware stores, starting around $40 to $50 per day.

Types of Rototillers

You’ll see a lot of confusing terms used to describe different rototillers. Here is a guide to decode them.

Cultivators

Cultivators are portable, lightweight, and ideal for smaller garden areas that simply need fertilizer worked in or some weeds removed. They come in both gas-powered and electric models.

Garden Tillers

Garden tillers are much more powerful machines, able to break ground, plow, and stir soil. There are three main types of garden tillers:

Front-tine: These are one step up from cultivators, able to weed, blend compost into and break the ground of new, small garden plots with sandy or loamy soil.

Rear-tine: Much more powerful than front-tine tillers, these are ideal if you’re breaking ground on a new garden with tough soil. These rototillers have large wheels with the tines in the back of the machine, often with choices for tines’ moving direction—forward, counter, or both. The tines’ ability to move in the opposite direction of the wheels allows the rototiller to penetrate the soil more deeply.

Vertical-tine: Less common than front- or rear-tine tillers, vertical-tine models cut forward through the soil, rather than downward. This makes them perform the task at hand faster than other types.

Cultivators	Garden Tillers
Depth	Four to 10 inches	Six to 11 inches
Tilling Width	Six to 16 inches	14 to 26 inches
Weeding	Yes	Not ideal
Breaking New Ground	Not ideal	Yes

Things to Do Before and After Tilling

Before you plug in this big piece of machinery, read our tips to ensure you’re completing the job correctly.

1. Clean Up Debris

Pick up any debris, sticks, and rocks that could jam the rototiller or prevent you from completing the job efficiently. If you are tilling a lawn, remove the old sod using a sod cutter.

2. Check the Soil

If the soil is dry, give it a little water to moisten it but don’t overdo it. You don’t want it to be muddy, so start with a light sprinkling and check the texture. Work some soil between your fingers; if it crumbles easily, begin tilling. If the soil clumps together, the soil is too wet.

3. Set the Depth

Set the rototiller’s depth bar to 4 to six 6 for leafy plants, or 6 to 8 inches for deep-rooted plants. If the tiller has a guard over its tines, put the cover down, so it doesn’t pull up rocks from the deeper parts of the soil.

4. Add Compost

Add any soil additives like compost or fertilizer after you do one round of tilling, then till again to mix these materials into the soil. We recommended testing the soil to confirm which kind of soil additive will benefit your space the most.

5. Change Direction

After you have tilled in one direction (say, east to west), til in the opposite direction for best results (north to south).

6. Rake the Area

Rake the area with the backside of a bow rake to smooth out the soil and get it ready for planting.

7. Wait It Out

Wait two weeks, so any weed seeds that have worked their way into the soil have time to germinate, then use the rototill once more to eliminate them. Now your soil is ready for planting!

8. Hire a Professional

A rototiller is a heavy piece of machinery. Consider hiring a gardening professional to prepare your soil for you, saving time and energy.

9. Repeat As Needed

You probably don’t need to till your soil yearly. Tilling too often can disturb beneficial worms and microorganisms in the soil. Only use a rototiller when you need to break up compacted soil to prepare it for a new garden, get rid of grass or weeds, or work soil additives into the earth.