On 09/08/15 17:43, 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.

How big is the lawn you want to remove? You are in for a lot of hard
work anyway - especially if the lawn has had a lot of footfall over the
years and is highly compacted. Trying to rotovate compacted soil,
especially if it has a lot of clay in it, will need a powerful machine
(depending somewhat on how deep you want to go), and trying to keep the
blades down, and not riding up over the surface, can be very tiring.

Using a cutter will save some work, but remember just how much you will
produce! For every 5cm depth, an area of 20 sq metres will make around a
tonne. All these will have to be lifted and moved if you want to compost
them. Do you have the space to compost everything?

One other way is to spray the lawn with glyphosate (eg Roundup), wait a
month, spray again, then wait another month and spray again to remove
any remaining very persistent deep-rooted weeds. Then you could
rotovate, rake flat, and sow your wildflower seeds.

--

Jeff