Rotavator vs. Fork?

[DWSmith]

At this point I want to get away from the motorized machinery as much as possible although I will be using a leaf blower in vacuum mode to gather and chop tree leaves for compost and mulch. Good TED talk on that topic - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n9OhxKlrWwc

I don't plan on digging my plot every year. It has never really been dug/turned by hand. Need to do it once while I still can.

Most of it is so loosened up that it should not be terribly difficult to turn by hand. The places I want to expand can be done more at my leisure.

[4390evans]

I think I have rotavated my garden once from what I can remember and although the earth looked so pretty and fine and it helped mix and rip up my home made compost I still prefer hand digging, and there is less worms killed

In my opinion, if I had a big bit of earth to do I would either rotavate the bits where I would be growing shallow rooted crops and hand dig the bit where you were going to grow carrots etc. As you do your crop rotation it would work out that the whole place is dug over every 4 year.

[chasingmytail]

No dig method here with mulch layers. Im to weak to dig and dont want to release seeds.

[ESBkevin]

I think I have rotavated my garden once from what I can remember and although the earth looked so pretty and fine and it helped mix and rip up my home made compost I still prefer hand digging, and there is less worms killed

In my opinion, if I had a big bit of earth to do I would either rotavate the bits where I would be growing shallow rooted crops and hand dig the bit where you were going to grow carrots etc. As you do your crop rotation it would work out that the whole place is dug over every 4 year.

Lots of sense in the second paragraph there. It transpires that digging in any form does more than disturb and kill the worms. The 'soil food web' is alive when undisturbed but any digging wrecks months of work nature has done and sets it way back. Yes we dig in fresh compost/muck to begin the process again, but better still to 1) not disturb it at all. 2) avaoid compaction as far as possible. 3) Leave living roots in the ground (chop off all plants at the surface and leave the remainder). All this was quite foreign to me, my father was a commercial horticulturalist and went by the book with rotavating/sterilising/fertilising/spraying to produce heavy crops of consistent size and quality. I'm gradually going back to nature and getting good results with the exact opposite but would not survive commercial production yet.

[Ruined]

I've never rotavated, mainly because of the bindweed and couchgrass. Chopping up all those roots would be awful and generated even more weeding.

I've always hand dug with a fork, occasionally double dug, but relied on my 4 year rotation with potatoes to cover a quarter of the plot and make me work it deeply every 4 years.

I'd love to eventually have a 'no dig' system...but I'm not there yet. I've always been organic so all weeds out by hand or mulch.