I’m considering buying the Mantix Tiller. It costs $500 Canadian. It would come with a Border Edger Attachment, a Kick Stand, and 100 Mixed Daffodils. But do I REALLY need it?
Pros:
- We have a 8′x20′ garden, which we want to enlarge, in addition to creating other flower and vegetable gardens on our property. It would save a lot of time and effort.
- My wife and mother would be able to easily use it.
- I could rent it to friends and neighbors who needed a tiller; it’s portable and light.
- I like the free stuff included with the package.
Cons:
- It costs five hundred dollars. Regular tillers cost around $300.
- I can afford it, but it’d be eating into our house-renovations savings.
- I could manually dig up the gardens, which I’ve been doing for the past 5 years; it’s good exercise.
I’d be buying it from Veseys.com, which is in York, PEI. It maybe cheaper for me to drive there than have them ship it.
Update: I rented one. See my comment below.
you could just rent it.
I’ve seen no place that rents this type of tiller, plus I’d be renting it every year. We didn’t put in a full garden this year because I was too lazy to dig the earth up or rent one.
Vesey says it will cost $30 to ship it, so that method will be cheaper than driving there to pick it up.
I’m leaning towards buying it.
Give me $500, I’ll drive to your house and dig the shit out of your garden!!!!! FREE! (except the $500)
The ground is so soft and stoneless in moncton. I would just buy a non-powered tiller. Just something you push yourself (ya lazy bastard) and it digs up the ground. You may have to roll it a few times to get the ground up as far as you’d like, but it’d be a hellova lot cheaper. We used to have a manual one in st. john’s (where the ground is either purchased from the mainland, or it’s 70% rocks) and it worked fine.
I doubt you’d rent it to your neighbours, you’d be all neighbourly and lend it to them for friendship, you friendly sucker you.
I agree with Pender.
You hear that Pender?!
Holy shit Phillip! I just took a screenshot, printed it out, framed it and hung it in my cubicle. Then I took a picture of that, transfered it to my computer and distributed it on the internet.
I left a comment at a blog that wrote about a Mantis Tiller, and the author emailed useful advice about it:
That was awfully nice of clarence to reply with an 1100 word essay.
Still, I’ve been in your yard and even if you were to til the entire thing with a manual tiller I wouldn’t say it’d take that long, they work surprisingly well.
When I lived on evangeline there was an old man who had a big ol’ garden beside his house, he had one of those tillers. His garden was probably 100×80 feet, or bigger, so he bloody needed it. It would take him all afternoon to do it too, and it would take him a good hour and a half to get the thing running smoothly every year. He kinda needed it though cause he was an 80 year old man, like jody who is HALF that age. He would only use it once a year.
In my super duper “holy crap is that ever freakin’ humble” humble opinion, $500 to save yourself an afternoon worth of work is just stupid.
I rented a Mantis Tiller today from Home Depot (50% off on Tues, Wed, Thurs). It didn’t do as well as I hoped: it couldn’t dig up the grass well where I wanted to extend my garden; I had to push down on it to dig in, and then go over the area a few times before the grass was dug up. It mixed dirt well, but it didn’t till deeply.
I think I’ll rent from now on, just getting a bigger tiller if I need to chew up grass.
Now aren’t you glad you didn’t buy one, mr. moneybags?