Sooo much pooping

[Patricia W]

I wonder if anyone has experience with rotavators? We've had our large garden cleared and now want to seed a lawn from scratch or put down turf It's heavy clay so we are planning to rotavate, and add sharp sand whichever we do.

 

I think we'd be better off hiring a machine for the weekend than buying as I'm not sure what else we'll do with it. Anyone done either and got any advice?

[Egluntyne]

I bought a Mantis tiller a few years ago, following a recommendation on the forum, and have found it very useful. We have heavy clay soil, which, when it dries , is like concrete and it breaks it up nicely.

[Patricia W]

That's what we have. What hp engine does it have?

[Egluntyne]

Oooh. Dunno. I'll go and have a look.

 

.....

 

It's a 25cc 4 stroke engine. Does that make sense?

[Charlottechicken]

My mum had a Mantis tiller for a community allotment a few years ago and found it perfectly manageable

[Patricia W]

Sounds good. I just didn't want to buy something else that sits in the shed for years and is rarely used

[chickencam]

If you have a large area to do then I would hire a larger machine, the Mantis is very small and they are great for small areas but a large area would take forever.

 

We have a large allotment and started off with a small Honda machine, similar size to the Mantis, OH then bought a large old Howard 350 machine which is fab and saves us so much time. We have since sold the small one but not until OH rotovated our heavy clay front garden with it about 10 years ago, we gave up trying to grow a lawn and have over the years with loads of soil conditioning made a nice cottage style garden instead.

[newcountrygirl]

We have a Mantis too. We got it off the dreaded Ebay! It is really good but I dont think it would work for a very large area.

[freddie]

Look on FB sites, items for sale in (put in the nearest decent sized town) you'll be astonished what comes up!! Or Farmers free ad's....

[Patricia W]

Never thought of that. At the moment I've reserved a hire one for next weekend. 3 tons of sharp sand has been spread over the garden so we have what resembles a beach. The cat thinks its a litter tray and the chickens think it's a dust bath! We're going to rotavate it all together and then decide what to do.

[Old Speckled Hen]

We've had our large garden cleared and now want to seed a lawn from scratch or put down turf It's heavy clay so we are planning to rotavate, and add sharp sand whichever we do.

 

 

We've had to do similar with our heavy clay.

The advice we got was to use masses of horticultural grit and four times that of compost.

Sharp sand will just turn your clay into concrete and all that money would have been spent for nothing.

[Patricia W]

Thanks OSH. We've just dug down 4 feet to plant a tree. It's about 6 inch's clay, then 2 feet of good top soil then clay again before it hits gravel at about 4 feet. We had an extension and we think the top 6 inch has comes from the footings when the builders "smeared" the spoil over the top soil which had built up from 50 years of cultivation. The gravel layer is there because of the geology of the area. If we went down any further we'd hit more clay, then gravel again apparently before we hit the water table at about 12ft.

 

We need to release the good top soil so rotavating may hopefully help. But I am thinking of a layer of top soil too. The composted chicken droppings are coming in handy too! I think it'll be next year before we have a lawn though. At least...