How to Till a Garden

I'm Bill Elzey with Showplace Lawns. How to till a garden. Well first of all you must ask why do you want to till it? Is it to cultivate the weeds, get rid of them? Then you need to be careful that you don't break off roots because the roots will stay and form new weeds and come back up. If you are tilling it for an installation I would suggest that first you use a shovel and dig it up, then come back with the tiller such as this and run the tiller over it. That will break everything up, level it out and make it easier to work with the rake to get a nice bed going. The other reason that you want to till it is you want to incorporate all the soil together and loosen it to where you can have something to work with at a depth that the plant's root will grow. You want to be careful when doing that depending on where you choose to put your garden there may be rocks. As you are tilling and you come to a rock area just simply lift it up and you'll be fine. Tilling a garden is something that doesn't need to be done all the time. Basically in the construction phase to get it going once it is planted then simply keep it cultivated with a hoe or a smaller tiller but keep in mind one thing too as far as tilling a garden is concerned, with the droughts that we have had across the country we need to think of ways of keeping as much moisture in the soil as possible. When we run a tiller across the surface we are opening that ground up and the carbon dioxide and stuff is coming out and what that does tend to do is dry the soil. So if you are going to till the garden till it in the beginning stages, till it when you redo it later on, but not do it as a constant activity in the garden.