It sure did take me a long while on the handles of a walk-behind tiller to cut sod from a moderate sized garden into the soil. I had taken the sod off by cutting it into squares with a box scraper scarifiers. Then, most of the squares pulled off the ground with very little encouragement from the scraper blade.

I piled the sod to one side but then decided that I'd be taking too much topsoil and so I starting cutting it with a tiller, and cutting and cutting and cut some more. Maybe 3ph tillers and a tractor with HST could make shorter work of it. That was before my compost pile got going really well. Now, I'd just take a few loads of compost to replace soil on the sod. I suppose if I did eat away at the chunks with a tiller, I could use a rake to take out the remaining pieces when I got tired of tending the tiller. Except for the green fertilizer value, taking the sod someplace else would be less work.

Grinding down high spots sounds like a fair bit of work getting dirt off the surrounding grass no matter how the grinding is done. It doesn't take much dirt to kill grass, and many implements would tear up the lawn. I used to end up using hand tools for the last bit of back-filling trenches that go across lawns. It's enough of an aggravation that I took to laying down vapour barrier to dump dirt on.

If the dips aren't too bad, I think it was Murf who suggested using top-dressing periodically, and eventually low spots come up to grade.

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