Can a numpty (me) level a garden with a mini digger..?

Ex digger driver and fitter here.

You'll likely spend the first day trying to learn how to use the digger and still not be that good. You'll eventually be able to dig with it, but proper levelling is a real skill. You'll also be really slow

Pay a professional 

We had one for a week for various jobs. I really enjoyed the levelling. It was the most challenging. You had to move all the controls at once so the bucket moved in a level line. Got pretty competent at it by the end. I'm sure a pro would be better and faster but it was fun and satisfying with good results.

I’d start by estimating the volume of soil that needs moving and then estimating how many buckets that is. My gut feeling is that it will lots and that once you add in moving stuff again as its in wrong place painful

Hi, yep I realise it’s a skilled job (also that I would spend ages making a mess before I got anywhere). 

I was planning to pay a professional but haven’t had much luck finding one :-/

I'd agree that you might make it less bumpy but it won't be level.

However as he describes the problem is find a professional who'll actually be professional

Large industrial rotorvator ?  Did a much smaller area, probably 15sqm with a small electric rotorvator

(When I say “level” I mean level enough for me to turf for the sprogs to kick a ball on. I’m not expecting it to ever be properly level) 

As someone who is doing exactly that right now, I reckon no. My plan with the digger is simply to break up and move the bulk of the soil that’s in the wrong place toward the right place. Levelling will be done by hand - with a rake and a laser.

Driving the digger is ace though.

(just checking you’re not actually me posting as not me, as your post on gabions was pretty much what I was going to ask that day?)

“As someone who is doing exactly that right now, I reckon no. My plan with the digger is simply to break up and move the bulk of the soil that’s in the wrong place toward the right place. Levelling will be done by hand - with a rake and a laser”

I’m wondering whether I could do basically this. I’m very aware that I don’t have the skills to level it accurately.

P.S. I don’t think I’m you?

Do you happen to be a slightly over weight middle aged bloke who used to ride mountain bikes and has a garden they don’t know what to do with? 🧐

Posted by: RopeyReignRider

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Do you happen to be a slightly over weight middle aged bloke who used to ride mountain bikes and has a garden they don’t know what to do with? 🧐

I'm Spartacus!

I have been pondering similar but as I have quite a few reasonable size jobs that will likely need doing again and again I keep looking at buying a chinese mini-digger, so OP buy one and let me know how it goes.

More seriously is there any decent forum, self building etc, that covers idiots buying plant equipment as I may actually do it?

There are a few YouTube videos. Mixed results but generally positive, although they usually need some fettling 

“I'm Spartacus!” 

🙂

“so OP buy one and let me know how it goes”

Somewhat spookily my Facebook page is full of ads for mini diggers.

Probably cheaper than the second quote I got including indeterminate number of days required X exponentially increasing day rate.. 

... I keep looking at buying a chinese mini-digger...

Those Chinese mini-diggers are they likely to be basically disposable items? Would any self respecting plant fitter service them, could spares even be bought to repair? 

I'd be more inclined to buy a secondhand, decent make one and sell later for probably little loss. 

I don’t think I’m you either, I think. 

I wouldn’t buy one but I can see why you’d consider it.  Weekend hire is pretty cheap but weekday can get expensive. Digger for retail would be ≈ £200 for a weekend. They seem to add on things that I as trade get for free: like buckets! I’ve a Brandon’s account so I don’t need hire in plant insurance, but that was only £70 for pretty much unlimited incompetence insurance. Deposit would be £400 . 

oh and don’t underestimate how much stuff you can shift with a micro digger. I thought we could offload to barrows and move it along the terrace. Turns out two buckets makes a barrow immovable. 

I want a mini digger too and I don't even need one.

Actually... the other week while discussing garden renovations I half-jokingly suggested a jump line along the edge of the lawn, for the kids (*cough*) to practise on. My wife actually thought it was a good idea 😮 Maybe I can kill two birds with one stone here 🤣

If the height difference is around 20"  you are needing take a max of 10" off the top and  move it to the bottom.  I levelled a sloping lawn about a quarter that area with a spade and wheelbarrow. The hardest bit was building the retaining 20" wall at the low end before moving the soil. 

While it is a fair amount of work it is the type of job that can be done a bit at a time and fitting in the oddhour here and there.

Ive used a mini digger and found it quite easy and intuitive 

I am a numpty and I can just about get by on one. Though to be fair I have owned one for almost 20 years and done an absolute shed load of work with it. Earlier this year I traded in my trusty old 3 tonner for a newer 4 tonner. Photo shows it set up with a post knocker to do a spot of fencing. You might also note the stream gap jump which I have tidied up a bit 😉

 

Would any self respecting plant fitter service them, could spares even be bought to repair? 

I'd be more inclined to buy a secondhand, decent make one and sell later for probably little loss. 

 

I’ve looked at a few longer term reviews on youtube and they tend to be fairly positive, although it not groundwork contractors but diy’ers so they are not getting a massive hammering.

We have just under two acres which needs drains doing, some levelling and clearing, lots of trees removed and we have a long drive which needs the drainage ditches doing every few years and the sides cleared. We also have an old cow shed which may need the floor digging out so when you add all the days up it might come close to cost price and then there’s always the possibility of selling it on to one of the local farmers. There’s no hire place nearby so this makes things awkward again. The secondhand market near us is quite small and you are still taking a punt the machine isn’t shagged unless you’re spending a lot more.

Go for it, hardly brain surgery is it.

As above, scrape it about level to the eye and use a laser or water level

After scraping it, hammer in stakes all over it in a kind of grid pattern, and use the laser etc to mark a line on each. you can then use strings between them and and judge it from there.

Mind if you do hire one that it is a dangerous bit of machinery, so keep young kids out the area and dont try any daft stunts.

Digger for retail would be ≈ £200 for a weekend. They seem to add on things that I as trade get for free: like buckets! I’ve a Brandon’s account so I don’t need hire in plant insurance, but that was only £70 for pretty much unlimited incompetence insurance. Deposit would be £400 .

Brandon's seem expensive. I get a week's hire of a 3t digger for £280 including 3 buckets, delivery and collection. All I have to do is make sure it's clean and full of diesel when they collect.

That's with a basic trade account at the local Sunbelt plant hire place.

FWIW to the OP, with no prior experience I've managed to dig up a garden, move earth around to where it was needed, level some of it, then dug trenches for drains and foundations. It took me a good 3-4 days to be comfortable enough with the controls to make a decent attempt at levelling. I'm soon to be sorting it the garden once and for all, I'll do the majority of the earth moving and I'll make a first pass at levelling, but I'll still be getting a man in to finish it off properly.

Do you know how deep the top soil is? Even if it's a rather deep 10 inches, you'll end up with barely anything at what used to be the top and over 2 feet on the other side. Top won't hold water and will be tricky to keep grass green (or growing at all, other side will settle, probably unevenly, and you'll end up with a slope again.  If you've got 5in of decent topsoil, you've got a bigger problem.

"Proper" way would probably be do to one end at at time, scrape the decent top soil off onto the other end, level the subsoil, push the topsoil back over, as well as the topsoil from the other end, level other end, then level the topsoil all over.

Very doable, even as a novice, but you're getting into the kind of complexity where an experienced driver will be a lot quicker, knowing what to do when and not end up shifting each cube metre 5 times over.  Having a proper investigate, making a plan will be very worth the time saved over figuring things out as you go. 

2nd the rotovator idea, fluffing the topsoil makes shifting by hand a hell of a lot easier for final levelling with a landscape rake, plank on a rope, lawn leveller, whatever. And nothing beats pigeon stepping over the whole area for compressing soft spots before you level again.  

Sorry, you did say: 18in. We had a lot too, turns out the stuff 9in further down was a lot denser and clayey than the stuff near the top, more easily compacted and harder to keep stuff growing nicely in.  A lot of the best stuff is now buried. Hey ho!

From poking about with a spade, it seems we have about 18” of half decent soil and my thought was to dig down 18” on the left hand side of the garden (so there’s a little bank and then level from there?

Assuming you're not dealing with layers, if you have a drop of 18 -22 inches you want to take 9-11in off the top edge, nothing from halfway and flip the triangle, no? 

Yes, you'll be able to, but it might not look how you had it in your minds eye. There is definitely a skill to using them effectively and with great results...that doesn't happen in a day.

Mate of mine went through a gas pipe last week doing a scrape.

Pay for it and get them to do grab hire all in one day

I had some not-professional 'professionals' level off land round my house. After a couple of days it looked like it was making my (steep) field above the house unstable (yikes part 1).

So they then used gabion baskets full of shale to 'stabilize' it. Turns out gabion baskets full of shale are not remotely stable and quickly begin to sag, distort and generally slide in a house-wards direction (yikes part 2).

That was very expensive. I guess doing it yourself probably won't be any worse...

Wrong tool for the job, get a bulldozer for levelling. 

20+ years 360 experience and current CPCS card holder. You get hang of the controls fairly quick but get decent result take a lot of experience and practice. I’d be honest I’m not brilliant at levelling but then I mainly used them with weed baskets and tree shears. 

if you could get hold of a Howard gem rotavator is surprising how much soil you can drag with one of them. Used one a lot when I worked turfing new builds in the late 80’s. 

Hello again.

So, I had a quote from a landscaper who actually turned up on time and gave me a price for the job. 

He’s quoted £1000 to level 157 square metres, pull out a tree stump and scrape off the top soil and put it back. 

Does that sound reasonable to the STW hive mind? 

thanks 

Mud patch dweller of Sheffield 

I've recently levelled a smaller sloping garden (approx 60m2), mostly by hand.

• Dug over turf by hand
• Used an electric tiller/rotavator to churn it all up
• Raked it all level (using a combination of rotavator, rake, scaffold board)
• Compacted it down (gardeners shuffle)
• Added some pre-turf fertiliser
• Laid turf

Before doing the above I've also spent a lot of time adding retaining walls and edging to give clear boundaries.

But just for the levelling, the cost was about 280 for the turf, about a tenner for the fertiliser and I bought the tiller from ebay for about 35 quid.

Obvs there's no hourly rate in that, but I'd estimate that added together it took me (an amateur) about 3 days.

Whether 1k is worth it, I guess is up to how much you value your time versus having someone do it for you.  If you're talking 3 times the area I worked on, then having someone else doing the grunt work def sounds appealing 😀

Work in progress

Waiting for turf

Tadaaa

My 2p

1) Pay someone, they will be quicker than you and unless you're either retired with a zero value on your free time or planning a new career as a cash-in-hand mini-digger driver and need to learn a skill, you'll be slow.

2) They weigh a literal ton. Bear that in mind when leveling and compacting. Wherever the digger tracks have been will be far more compacted than wherever it's dumped the fresh soil.

Last time I hired a man+digger he was very apologetic that his minimum charge was £120 as he briskly and efficiently dug out and broke up about a ton of concrete kerbstones in 30min that, even if I could have somehow broken up in situ, would probably have done my back in lifting them out of the ground, and likely have taken my entire weekend. 

And +1 for buying a tiller, leveling rake and roller off ebay / facebook to get the resulting over-compacted, level-ish surface finished.

Pure speculation here, but the rotorvator seems like the best option to add soil/ sand (yes).

You’re only going to attempt a task like this once, so having proper drainage and good soil is fundamental.

maybe the best source is a proper golf greenkeeper?

what kind of grass do you plan to reseed it with?

Don’t people urge caution about removing too much soil, adjacent to garden walls?

have just finished a similar job - about half the size, I used a electric tiler - it had serious trouble getting into the compacted clay, which is like concrete after so little rain.  It made absolutely tonnes of dust - had the neighbours having a moan about dust on their cars across the street.... levelling was done by eye and raking in different directions.  Seeded by hand for about £100.  Took 3 days in all.  Lawn is looking okay - its germinating patchy but I think that is more down to the flocks of pigeons feasting on the seeds than me doing something wrong

what I did find was after the raking, the soil still settled unevenly, I don;t know why, presume some clay wasn't broken up enough.  It'll be an easy fix with some extra sand/soil mix in the low spots.  For me, as a lawn that kids will be kicking a ball on, it needs to be 'ok'.  Laser levelling is for patios, not grass.....

Don't over think it, just get on with it.

Can you not sprinkle some self levelling soil?

Thanks for the replies guys.

I’m not sure on the rotator idea tbh - it’s a big space to drag soil across. I also need to account for the hard core where the path used to be. 

I have turfed before but onto fresh new topsoil. I was just wondering how much he needs to be tilled / tiled / tillered and then presumably rollered after? Does the roller not then undo what the tiller does? 

many thanks 

“Don’t people urge caution about removing too much soil, adjacent to garden walls?”

The house is a semi where the “uphill” side is attached and the gardens are only a few inches different after levelling. 
There’s a retaining wall (and my new amazing gabions) on the far side, with a 4’ drop into the next semi’s garden. 

look at it another way.

Are you likely to have an excuse to hire and play with a digger for a weekend again?