It was a sunny and quite warm 22nd of December morning. I finally pulled out the box containing the rotavator (cultivator) from the shipping container. Three years on! I had bought in England but had never got round to using it. It took me a good few hours to assemble it the previous afternoon.
The machine seems to be quite well built. It started up the first time round and ran well.
The make of the machine is Einhell. Model: BG-MT 3335. It has a gross weight of 35 kg. The digging blades have a circumference of 25 cm. It has 163 cm³ 4 stroke petrol engine is a light noise level of 95 dB whatever that means. I'm not sure how to gauge levels of noise by just listening. I need to read up on this. It would be good to know at what decibel level damage to hearing begins.
I trundled the machine on its one solid wheel, half a kilometre down the road to the neighbours. I was making a small vegetable plot for them and this was an ideal opportunity to test out the cultivator. I never used one before.
All in all it went pretty much okay. The only problem I had was that because the plot was on a slope the machine could not climb the gradient on the blades and I had to physically haul it uphill. It also needed this sort of donkey work when the ground was soft as it simply sank in.
The soil was a mixture of the native clay combined with 15 cm of imported topsoil and a couple of barrows of leaf matter, in this case carob leaves. Cultivator mixed this all nicely together in no time.
After this I finished off by terracing partially the plot. This was to stop the soil from running of in the event of heavy rain. For this I used a combination of logs and small stones to seal the gaps between the logs.
Not being in the mood to walk back home, uphill over stony ground, I opted to transport the cultivator by means of my electric bike and trailer. This went quite well in the cultivator is now back in storage eager to go again.
Update 29th December 2017.
I had a chance to use the cultivator a bit more today. I used it to mix in compost. The soil was damp but still quite firm, being clay soil. This is due to the fact we have not had consistent rainfall during the winter season.
As my friend Kristen remarked cultivators are not easy to use per se. With this Einhell I found the narrow width and small size of the front wheel, makes it very difficult to push forwards. The engine is sufficiently powerful and the rotor blades keep turning. But the machine simply get stuck and it requires brute force to be pushed forwards or pulled backwards. You really have to be quite strong to use it. It requires real donkey work. Other than this it's very good for working round trees and small areas. As you can see I worked in the compost into the strip of earth in between the young guava trees.
In a nutshell, this Einhell cultivator like other cultivators would would be of better benefit if it had self drive built-in. But I guess this would increase the price. So it is a case of courses for horses and beggars can't be choosers.