nikirushka wrote:
Hello I'm new here, it looked like a good place to get some info
so here I am!

I have a large garden and the lawn is just more than I can manage.
I've been here 8 years and every summer it gets away from me at least
once, needing weeks of mowing and re-mowing to get it short and green
again. Currently it's 6-7 weeks since the last mow so as you can
imagine, it is very long!

So I want to start again. I've sourced a rotovator - not sure how
strong, it belongs to a friend but I haven't seen it. She says it's
just a little one, and petrol.

I need to know pretty much everything - preparation, the rotovating
itself, preparing the ground afterwards for re-seeding.

This will not be with grass - I'm going for a mix of white clover,
daisy, ribwort plantain, speedwell and a few other similar things:
still need mowing but nowhere near as much as the current stuff and
if I can't manage it for a few weeks, I'll still be able to catch up
again.

So, help please! Ideally, I'd like to not have to mow the current
lawn short again before I rotovate it but I figure I'll probably have
to. I don't mind removing the grass sods post-roto, the overall
ground level could do with taking down a little anyway as it's crept
up an inch or two over the years.


If you want the grass to be gone, rent a sod cutter, cut the sod deep enough to
get most of the roots, then compost the cuttings to kill off the roots and seed,
before re-introducing them into the bed. If you just till the grass in, it will
take a few repetitions of tilling and raking out the grass clumps to get most of
them.