Tips for establishing a new garden in a new development area

Would you recommend buying an electric garden tiller for about €100-150? They usually have a working width of about 40-45cm and a working depth of 20-22cm and a 1400/1500 watt motor

Can you recommend a garden tiller? I have already found several: Einhell, Parkside Maso, Scheppach, etc.

We once tried to dig with hand tools – hardly any chance, the soil is rock hard

We have about 250sqm

We had the small one from Einhell in use, I was positively surprised by it. Basically, it tills as deep as you want if you hold it firmly in one spot long enough. ;) But moving that thing really works your arms. However, that was in Lower Saxony, where they have dream soils. They are nowhere near as hard and stony as here. If you have a lot of stones in the soil, I would advise against it. Stones quickly jam the machine; you end up spending more time picking stones out of the hooks (which is extremely difficult when they are pulled in with so much force) than you do really tilling.

Rent a powerful petrol-powered one. But they are not easy to handle. I borrowed ours from a gardener friend and honestly, he had to take over too. The tiller did whatever it wanted with me. I am neither delicate nor weak in the arms. And a decent spade you can step on well.

so you could recommend the router from Einhell? yes, it's clear that it will be exhausting

The devices from the hardware store are very expensive, about 100€ per day, and if they are even more powerful, then they are even harder to control

does anyone have experience with the Parkside devices?

In the garden, we don't have as many stones as in the front yard, in the garden they are mostly just dried clods of earth

so you could recommend the Einhell tiller? yes, it’s clear that it will be tiring

The devices from the hardware store are very expensive, about €100 per day, and if they are even stronger, then they are even harder to control

does anyone of you have experience with the Parkside devices?

In the garden we don’t have as many stones as in the front yard, in the garden it’s mostly just dried clods of earth

Could it be that you ignore all the advice suggesting that there is no quick, cheap solution? Einhell and Parkside are good for light, shorter jobs. If you have a heavily compacted clay soil where not even wild growth currently spreads and which is hardly workable with a spade, then you might as well flush the money for the cheap discount store devices down the toilet and at least enjoy the sound of flushing. And I write this as someone who struggled all last summer with a compacted clay soil on 500 sqm. My lesson from last year: For lawns: bring in topsoil, sand, and turf. For small beds, the spade works quite well, along with lots of compost and sand. And weed regularly. For larger beds, green manure over the winter worked quite well but also the no-dig method. What really didn’t work was tilling, even with a petrol-driven tiller that we borrowed. Afterward, we only had a bumpy field of thick clay lumps, which became rock-hard in dry weather. The weeds loved it. We had brought those up from deeper layers and fertilized with a nice fresh layer of topsoil – and the roots were almost impossible to pull out. The area is now a hump track that the lawn mower can hardly handle. In the bed edge, the shrubs are also rather weak. We lost two serviceberries, a blackthorn, and an elderberry that way.

Take the ones from the hardware store. Using a small motor tiller here is penny-pinching at the wrong end. You can use something like that to turn over your vegetable patch every year. 100€ is pocket change in the garden complex.

In the garden, everyone has to make their own experiences, we learned that as gardening beginners last year. But you should listen to tips if you don't want to build up too much frustration. A tip from a gardening forum that was very good: having a soil sample analyzed in order to specifically build up the soil. We used that for the fruit orchard and it probably saved us a lot of money, since young fruit trees seem to react extremely sensitively to deficiencies.