Hand tools only?

[PhoenixAngel429]

How can I get a garden started with hand tools only? I have no money for plows or tillers.:/

 

[silkiechicken]

That's what my my little brother and I have done when we didn't have access to a tiller. We each grab a shovel, start digging... and digging... and digging. A day later we rake, rake, rake to get the grass and junk to a single area. Then repeat a month later if the place we dug up was not already "dead" from tractoring meat birds on it.

So it can be done, just takes some time and muscle.

 

[digitS']

Can you tell us what you are working with?

*What kind of soil do you have?
*What is growing there now?
*Has it ever been a garden?
*What tools do you have to work with?
I'd like to say that I've started maaannny a garden without a tiller. That may not be quite accurate because I can't remember how I started gardens 40+ years ago.

I've maintained gardens with no tillers. I've also taken over weed-infested gardens without a tiller - sometimes, it wouldn't work well to till in weeds.

Also, there have been some small spaces (one 18' x 20', another about 12' x 20') that I've put into cultivation without a tiller. I guess those might count as gardens but they weren't stand-alone gardens.

Steve
fond of hand tools/dislikes tillers

 

[PhoenixAngel429]

Can you tell us what you are working with?

*What kind of soil do you have?
*What is growing there now?
*Has it ever been a garden?
*What tools do you have to work with?
I'd like to say that I've started maaannny a garden without a tiller. That may not be quite accurate because I can't remember how I started gardens 40+ years ago.

I've maintained gardens with no tillers. I've also taken over weed-infested gardens without a tiller - sometimes, it wouldn't work well to till in weeds.

Also, there have been some small spaces (one 18' x 20', another about 12' x 20') that I've put into cultivation without a tiller. I guess those might count as gardens but they weren't stand-alone gardens.

Steve

Clay soil
Clovers and cover plants.
Yes
Shovels rakes pick axes hoes

That help?

 

[digitS']

I may not be much help . . .

Altho' there is some clay in my garden soil, it must be nearly 50% gravel. Rocks from football size on down to pea gravel. Most of the rock, about the size of my thumb.

Clay . . . if you can loosen the soil with your hand tools to about 4" and incorporate a good deal of organic matter (compost/composted manure) there's no reason you can't have a garden there. I'd say loosen it to 6" but if you can get 2" of compost into the soil, you should be good to go.

Now, we need to hear from gardeners experienced with clay!

Steve

 

[dickiebird]

My grand parents did an acre garden every year by hand. Grandpa came home each evening and used a spade for about an hour before dinner and another hour after, until it was all done.
They planted lots of corn, tomatos, beans, cabage ect.
Actually thinking back about 1/4 of the garden was in asp., rubarb, strawberries and blackberries, so that was not turned over every year.
Myself I have 2 large tractors, a plow, disc and a 5' tractor mounted tiller but still find that using hand tools is often more productive.
I use my tiller on other peoples gardens more than mine!!!

THANX RICH

 

[patandchickens]

How can I get a garden started with hand tools only? I have no money for plows or tillers.:/

I have almost exclusively ever used hand tools (although since two years ago we have one of those stupid little Mantis tillers that was given to us, but I believe it has only experienced maybe 15 minutes of running time and that was mainly just to see how it'd do )

There are two ways to do it (well ok probably more, but it boils down to this): the fast hard way, or the slow very-easy way.

The Fast Hard Way:

Skim the sod off your garden plot, knock off as much soil as will come off freely when you whomp it a few times, and put the sod aside in a pile upside-down to compost (or use to patch bare or low spots in your lawn, that is what I do when I remove sod to enlarge beds LOL)

Find a book with directions for single- or double-digging a garden bed (it is really simple but really works better with pics to explain so I am going to weenie out and not even try). Do it, removing all visible weed roots as you go along. Try to break up the shovelsful a bit by whacking with the edge of the shovel, if necessary, b/c subsequent steps are much easier if you do not have big clods the size of your head.

<insert Tylenol here, also probably you owe yourself a quart of very, very good chocolate ice cream>

Add at least SOME good relatively-weed-free compost. If you are on very clayey soil, or the topsoil is thin and your digging runs you into subsoil, add as much as you can get (one heaping wheelbarrow per 2 square yards is not too much, although you will probably not WANT or BE ABLE to add quite that much). If it is barely clayey and already pretty good loose fluffy soil, don't sweat it as much but you really should add SOME.

Use shovel or digging fork to roughly dig it all together. You are not trying to be a rototiller, you are just trying to get things vaguely mixed and all major air voids filled. (Note: some would add this stuff AS you are digging over the bed; it depends partly on tastes and partly on what your equipment, soil and dexterity are like)

Rake it smooth with a metal bow rake.

You're ready to plant!

The Slow Very-Easy Way:

Cruise the curbsides on garbage day for people discarding large pieces of old wall-to-wall carpeting. (Alternatively, you can use thick black plastic but IMO carpeting works a lot better)

Lay it out, preferably upside-down, on the area you want to convert to garden, making sure to overlap well at seams. Weight down to whatever degree seems wise to prevent wind from removing it. Cover with mulch or grass clippings or waste hay or suchlike if you want it to look less like upside-down rotting carpeting, but this won't affect how it works.

Buy a book on container gardening (no, seriously!)... container-garden for at least the first year, first two years if the soil in question has very dire weeds in it like a thick infestation of poison ivy or thistle or goutweed (Aegopodium).

The next year, or in two years if it had severe perennial weeds, remove the carpet. (I find I can often reuse it in another spot, although it sometimes gets too fragile and falling-apart and has to go to the landfill at long last) You will discover that your soil is less compacted than it was, there are hardly any weeds.

Roughly dig with a digging fork just to loosen the soil a bit more in the places where you will plant.

Now you can plant.

(At the end of that first season, or even at the beginning when you first remove the carpet if you are really avid or feel your soil is *too* clayey, it is a good idea to spread maybe 4" of finished compost across the garden and roughly dig it in with your digging fork.)

As you can probably guess, I tend somewhat more towards the latter (slow easy) method... but WILL use the quicker faster method for limited areas if I really need to use them NOW.

The biggest warning I can give you is: do not say "oh, well I know there are still a lot of weed and grass roots in this area but I will take care of them later, let me plant my plants NOW". It is maybe fifty times harder to get grass/weeds out of a bed once it is planted than to do it BEFORE you plant, and many of them will go seriously berzerk right about the time of summer when it gets too hot for you to enjoy weeding and the garden plants are starting to interfere with your ability TO weed. So be as serious about it as you can stand. And it is quite possible that you will still end up too weedy and have to bite the bullet at the end of your first garden season and spend an hour a day for a week or two in the Autumn digging over the garden and carefully removing all bits of weed roots by hand. Which will repay your efforts a hundred fold over the coming years

GOod luck, have fun,

Pat

 

[vfem]

Great advice! I've hand dug many times. We borrowed a tiller on a couple of occasions when I was just too tired to do it all by hand. We have a good 1000 sq ft of garden space among our property, I'll say I get about 400 of that by hand (my husband did about 100 before he started running around trying to find a tiller that eventually attacked me!).

I say start small so you're not hating yourself. Pick a smaller spot, maybe 100 sq ft to start total or less. You can get quite a bit out of such small space believe it or not!

What I found I liked was a did a huge amount of our prep work, and sweaty labor work in the fall, the winter days that were mild and the mild beginning of spring. I couldn't imagine doing all that hard work and digging on an 80 degree day... no matter what! I see people doing hard gardening work at the end of May when its 85 out and then they quit because its just too hard to do. When those days come, I'm already planted and I'm just walking around with a glass of lemonade and a hose at 7am before it gets over 70. I refuse to dig or do any heavy hauling after memorial day. This is the season everything grows, and I just collect!

So start small, and then if you were happy with your results and want to expand.... start picking up your shovel again come September or October. DO some prep then, and get back to it the next April to get everything ready for the next season. Take the summer months to compost so you have good amendments to get in next fall or spring and use those hot nasty months to enjoy the fruits of your labors.

And I commend you on doing this without a tiller. I will never use one again as I am forever scared after a tiller attack last month! Bloody pictures of my poor nose are available in the "My Garden, My Family, ect" section. Not pretty!