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What size piece of land are you rotivating and what are your reasons for doing so?
In my experience you will have to remove turf first which can be done with a turf cutter if you have a hire shop local. Which brings me to my next recommendation which is to hire the biggest, heaviest, petrol rotivator of doom you can afford and do the job once. I don’t think it’s great for soil health to continually ‘aerate’ it so I wouldn’t purchase the tool for repeated use but I understand needing to get some goodness into clay soil.
When I hired a mini digger and fully rearranged our garden I needed to do this on a 10x30M.
inchpincher-
It's about 9*1.5 meter for hedges, reason is the clay is very waterlogged. It can be done by hand it's just slow...
As the garden was covered in plastic (FFS) the natural soil breakdown process never happened and so the clay underneath is just pottery clay :)
I cleared the water elder from it already. Yes, that stuff. Weed fights that cannot be won :)
Sounds like a rental is best then.
Didn't know about milk thistle seeds staining, well if they come up plenty of boggy lawn I can stick them in.
JWestland
I've super heavy clay soil, are there any hand rotivators that work or should I just save up for a good electric one?
Of course digging it out with the trenching hoe works too but it's hard and slow work...
(And I'm not 20 anymore....) :)