It's snowing here now and you post this?

Anyone have suggestions on a tiller? What's a good brand?

EN said:

It's snowing here now and you post this?

Ditto: The roads are closed, 60MPH wind, and 14" of snow today, total white'out.

I doubled my garden this year from 240 sq' to a little over 500.  I don't till the soil, and I have clay soil.  What I do is that in this new section I will plant a bunch of nitrogen fixing legumes and then around November, I'll spread 2 bails of of hay.  Next year the soil will be perfect for planting directly into it.

I have begun to collect coffee grounds from the office.  I pour them into a 5 gallon bucket with water and pour the tea directly on the the trees or garden.  I think it is better than buying nitrogen fertilizer since it comes with salts that eventually render the top soil sterile and more dependent on more fertilizer.  If you have a couple of acres, of course, pouring coffee grounds may not be feasible.  In that case you can try companion gardening with nitrogen fixing plants.

What a weekend…got my seedlings started (yes: late as ususal but i think it was in time). I'm trying for 20 roma tomato plants so I can can tomato, spaghetti, and pizza sauce with this type tomato (one of the few things my wife will eat!). Got the potatoes and onions in one of the raised beds (5x10x1.5). The ground could've been a lot looser on the soil but it had rained the day before (hard) so I tried to mix some potting soil in with it to give it some starting fertilizer and loam. It's hard to work around the weather, planting schedules, and a full time job on top of that, in order to get it right but proper planning is all part of the learning process. Besides, what the hell else am I going to do? (Druid would say that instead of wasting my time in the garden, I should get a second job instead…he might be right from a productivity standpoint but there ain't nothing like bringing fruit from the earth, by the work of your own hands on your own land). Also turned the compost pile (next years batch). It's too small, I need to find a local supplier of horse manure and add leaves to it. Looking at investing in a mulcher for the leaves and many stems and limbs in my surrounding woods. And that minitiller would be perfect for the size I want to cultivate.

Crab Apple said:

This VERTICAL compost tumbler looks easy to make and should turn out great topsoil about 20 – 30 gallons of it every 2 to 3 weeks.

I will make mine high enough to dump it right into the wheel barrel.

 Thanks, Crabby: I'll check it out when I get home (at work now and there's a block from watching video's). I have to admit though, not having used one of these, I'm a tad bit skeptical. The quickest I've been able to compost leaves was about a year and had to add lots of manure to the pile to get it all to decay, but this thing will do it in 3 weeks? Does it depend mostly on what you're trying to compost? I could use something that would speed up the process 'cause it's getting costly to keep buying these !amn soil amendments.

Jarhead,

You can use fresh manure as the green and leaves for the brown but don't use hog dog cat or human as they all have the dangerous parasite problem … but that can be dealt with or simply used in an orchard or forest (fertilizing sugar maples or white oaks) as that way you avoid the possibility of putting parasites in contact with your veggies.