Anybody using a lawn tractor tiller for plots?

My neighbor here in the ‘Burbs was tilling his garden last night. I’d never really taken much notice, but here he’s using a tiller that mounts on the back of his John Deere lawn tractor.

So that got me thinking, hey… Could you do small food plots with that?

It’s really nifty, I went over to look at it and it’s about a 30-34 inch wide tiller, seems to have a pretty substantial gearbox. Neighbor claims that he used to to break the sod originally when he started the garden.

It really does a nice job of working up the soil. I understand that if you were breaking old hay fields into plots it’d be slow the first time, but as far as cost I could see this being a lower entry price for doing smaller food plots.

Is anyone else using a lawn tractor / tiller setup out there or has tried it and can educate me as to the failure point? Is this strictly a light duty toy for a 20 foot x 30 foot garden plot that needs tilling once a year?

I totally get that no way are you going to do 10 acres with this. I’m thinking about small kill plots here, probably the max is 1500 square feet or so.

Grouse

I think you could easily use one. I know guys who have used hand tillers. I would use mother nature to our advantage also. Mow and round up. Plant some crops like brassicas the first year. That will help break up the soil etc…

Gouse,

We rented a small Kubota with a 5′ tiller last year up near Bemidji. It was something like $320 for a full day. This ground hadn’t been turned in quite a while. As long as there are no rocks, a person can get quite a bit tilled in a short amount of time. Just a thought.

Yeah, I thought about the rental aspect too. I’ve rented a big hydrostatic walk behind when we had to redo a secion of our lawn. I know you can rent the full tractors with PTO driven tillers as well.

But the lawn tractor option was especially appealing because then I could easily transport the whole rig myself. Also there is a whole host of nifty stuff like a tow-behind sprayer, and spreader that would be handy.

Obviously, the money-no-object solution is to buy a compact tractor and full-on farm imps. The problem I have is the logistics of storing and hauling all that heavy stuff around. Fine if you have one big property and it’s a one-time deal, but for multiple smaller properties, it’s never going to cost or time feasible.

Grouse

I use a John Deere 322 with a 36″ tiller to do my foodplot. It is about 1 acre and I can get it done in a few hours and a couple tanks of gas. It really burns through the fuel when the tiller is engaged. Planned on doing it today, but it is raining!

Hi, Can you please tell me what is the best tiller brand that you’ve used? Thanks! I’m quite sure I will be informed plenty of new stuff right here!

Small plots using a garden tractor/tiller will work fine for small plots.
I have a bigger tractor, 57 hp, w/5′ tiller…but I do bigger plots.

If you are digging fresh ground:
A small tiller with have problems with tree roots, heavy grass residue after mowing and rocks. If you hit a tree root or big rock with your tiller, it will cause you problems. Grass will get bound up it.
I’d use a disc on fresh ground first and then clean it up of all those things before using the tiller.

a tip I learned – After tilling, you’ll expose every weed seed that’s been in the ground for years. I like to till it, wait a couple weeks and then spray the heck out of it. Then plant it. Otherwise, your seed will compete with all those weeds and the weeds will win every time.

2 major things to keep in mind.
1. Lawn Tractor Vs. Garden tractor – The cheaper the tractor, the cheaper the transmission and drive parts. The average weight on tow behind tiller is about 250 to 300#. Add in any incline to the ground and you can burn up a tranny super fast. I know, because I burned up a lot of the John deere L series POS tractors. I did some serious research before buying my last tractor and the tranny was the deciding factor in that purchase. If you have an existing tractor, look back in the manual and see what it is rated for and use with grades in the landscape.

2. Price point on tillers. You’ll see a lot that are manufactured to retail at under the $1,500 mark. They are built to be UNDER that price point and maintain margins, so the components are a direct reflection of reverse engineering. After the 1500 mark, most will jump up to well over 2K. In most cases, you get what you pay for. Just like light weight lawn tractors, they use lighter steel in the tines, drive box, wheels,…. Keep in mind the scale of which you are using it, A pristine 1/3 acre flat garden Vs 1 ac and towing it to/from the plot site is a huge difference.

A buddy of mine bought the DR tiller and loves it. He does about 4 acres a year and has multiple segments within his plots. He also pulls it with a 35hp diesel Kubota. I had a Craftsmen (Sears Brand) that i bought at an estate sale. Burned it up just doing sand like soil in a 100′ x 50′ garden. Know what your buying and look at higher end as a comp before buying.

Randy, in the meantime a kind forum member came forward and mentioned he was interested in selling his King Kutter ATV disc harrow. He had modified it to include welded-on weights and a cultivator rack with 4 tines that dig in after the discs.

I bought it and used it this summer to break up a small test plot I cleared, about half an acre. It works very well, I was impressed with how much it actually “turned” the soil over.

I’m glad I bought it. The dozer just got dropped off at my property yesterday and tomorrow the operator starts on clearing two new plots. One is about 4 acres, the other is 5 acres.

I’m probably undergunned with an ATV disc on this kind of acerage, but the plan is to plant about 60% of it in clover, so this will only require tillage about once every 3-4 years. The remaining area will be annual crops and will be tilled every year, but that should be manageable with this setup.

As always, if cost and storage were no object I’d do it differently. Right now, on my property, I only have a 10×16 shed. So I can keep my ATV, tools, spray rig, etc, but a tractor and other stuff is out of the picture for now.

Grouse

Be sure to put a trail camera up in a tree on your shed if it’s at risk of theft. Todder’s has had the “meth” crowd rob him blind over the years in that area.

kooty wrote:

Be sure to put a trail camera up in a tree on your shed if it’s at risk of theft. Todder’s has had the “meth” crowd rob him blind over the years in that area.

There’s a trail cam on my driveway going in. I’m a half mile off the county road and you have to go down someone else’s driveway and across a pasture to get to my place tucked way back in the woods, so very few people even know my shed is back there.

But good point. My backup plan is just to carry good insurance and hope I never need it. I figured that if anyone were to get back there and clean me out, they’re probably going to take everything including the woodpile because there will be no one there to see or stop them.

But a funny story. A friend of mine has a place about 3 miles from us and they were headed up late on a Friday night and got there to find the chain on their gate had been cut. So they parked their truck so it blocked the driveway, gunned up, locked, loaded, and called the cops.

In the meantime, they could hear that people were in on their property, they had obviously caught the perps in the act. So the cops showed up and said, let’s wait for them to come out on their own So everyone just moved back and waited.

Eventually two local meth-heads with a pickup load of stuff they had stolen out of the cabin came bouncing down the driveway. They were obviously stoned and they stopped and both got out of the cab and are standing there scratching their heads and saying, “Hey, this truck wasn’t sitting here blocking the road when we came in, was it?”

About then, one of the cops hit them with the spotlight and did the “Police! Hand’s up.” yell. One of the @sshats did as he was told, the other turned and ran full-speed into the woods.

He must have been temporarily blinded by the spotlight or whatever. He ran straight into a 10 inch popple tree at full speed and knocked himself out stone cold.

The best part was that he later tried to claim that the police had hit him and knocked him out. He didn’t realize that besides the police, there were 4 other witnesses that saw the jackwagon brained himself on the tree, so the police brutality claim didn’t get him very far. Both the assclowns got sent up the river for this robbery and they were found in possession of other stuff from other break-ins. As the kicker these two certified geniuses also had a whole bunch of meth and a nice big bag of pot on them.

Grouse

I love warm and fuzzy stories like that.