Hazel Fergus

If you've got some time or an audible account - check out David R. Montgomery's books on soil. Long story short - tilling is not your friend. It will cause more problems than it will solve. Rather than invest in renting or purchasing an expensive and petroleum guzzling piece of equipment, put that $ into your inputs. The soil, while it may look rough, currently has a structure and only needs the addition of organic matter. I've put it into practice and found that feeding my soil life paid back dividends!

We use wood pellets for our cat litter, and sprinkle it every couple of days with dry bokashi. It cuts down on the smell (cat pee is too strong to fully mask) and we feel it's a great first step in the composting process before we put it outside. We scoop the poo daily and put that into the bokashi bucket (sprinking the layers with dry bokashi) until it fills up and then put it away for 3 weeks to pickle.
So far it's been a great system, considering we used to use clay litter sent to the landfill and felt we were contributing to some future contagion disaster.