Rotavator on hire! Any tips? Clay soil and I have cardboard!

[Tori]

Ok don't use HSS to hire rotavators from. I booked it online for £34 and when I get there they tell me its £68 and I have to have it back by 1pm or return it to a different branch which is about 50 miles away - great! So I told them where they could stick their rotavator and we went and dug lottie old fashioned style! Got 18m2 done yesterday going back for round 2 today - when OH recovers from the beer intake of last night!

[Matt.]

Gutted for you. I thought £35 sounded a great deal. I've used a local hire shop before and this costs about £40 for the days hire. They deliver it to site and pick up. Maybe ask around on your site or check yellow pages etc for independant tool hire.

Then again sounds like you're doing well with the digging. In my opinion this is better anyway as you get chance to remove roots and stones that you don't want in there.

[Two_Sheds]

Cardboard is good "brown" for your compost heap, and it is also a good water retainer in a bean trench.

Bonfires are fairly anti-social, and I don't think you'll get much ash (nor will it be very nutritious) from burning cardboard anyway.

[Tori]

Well I have been digging away and have done 1 and a half beds now - and the bed's are 4.5m by 3m! Only trouble is the giant lumps of clay (where I have dug) need bashing into decent workable soil now. It's like beating the sh** out of cannon balls!

[feefeelalabelle]

im having problems with mine too, its literally all clay but cant really afford to hire the tools at the moment, when its all dug and composted should things grow ok or will i be limited to what i can grow x

[Tori]

I think so clay soil is supposed o be very fertile.

Another bed dug and it's not clay! So the spuds are going in there!

[Two_Sheds]

I think so clay soil is supposed o be very fertile.

Yes, there's always an upside.
My soil is coastal ... it's made chiefly of sand, stones and couch grass.

It'll get there though, little by little.

[snakeshack]

borrowed the huge rotavator from another plotholder after the origional one failed to run.
was like being dragged through brambles by a stampeding team of wild oxen while being beaten with baseball bats.

broke up the soil nicely though

[Spiderling]

Our allotment is clay based too, and we don't rotavate at all. We have double dug all of it, incorporating plenty of manure as we went along. After five years, the soil is improved 100% and is much easier to dig and the drainage has improved no end.
The thing with rotavating is it creates a "pan" of hard clay at the depth of the blades which makes for poor drainage. We have still more improving to do, figuring, if we do all the hard graft now while we're still fit, it will get easier as we get older!!!!!
When we first started, we cultivated a bit, then got crops into it as soon as we could, then started on the next bit. Before we knew it, we had alot of crops on the go and felt as though we were really making headway. We don't have much of a perennial weed problem either, just annuals which we hoe every chance we get.