[suziequeue]

I am thinking of getting a petrol powered one man post hole borer with a variety of augers for fencing and growing veg.

Anybody got any experience of them? What makes etc?

Thanks

[bloomer]

the only ones i have used have been hired and therefore fairly expensive machines.

for where we were at the time (Warwickshire) they were rubbish as they didn't like the heavy clay soil...

would love to try one out on better ground though as in theory they are a great idea...

[suziequeue]

Yes - we are on heavy clay soil here as well :-(

[robert waddell]

they are limited to what the holder/operator can stand up to   tractor driven ones are better but none like stones even the big meter wide ones for piling don't like stones in the first meter cant get them straight and dead centre for the building
shove hollers are a better alternative

[Small Farmer]

We're on heavy clay too with a lot of flint so tried a tractor mounted one once without success.  We dig strainers in by hand with the aforementioned shuvholer  I try to get intermediates in while the ground is wet using a drivall but we're in drought now and the land is cracking.

Saw a piling job done in the London Docks where the budget was spent three times over because the rig kept hitting the blocks of granite dumped when they filled in the docks.

[montana]

We hired a mini digger with a auger, we are on chalk and have lots of flints our tractor mounted auger struggled , but the mini digger was great  and very precise.

[OhLaLa]

If it's a one off job, you could hire a man with borer on the back of his tractor, but our jobs are ongoing so we have a petrol one. Wouldn't be without it. Also have the manual push round type but it never gets used.

[chrismahon]

We had a lot of posts to go in and looked to buy one. They are fairly inexpensive but you need one with a safety bar to disengage when the auger hits a rock or brick. The ones with shear pins are continuously breaking. They are a bit of a handful to use and a two man one is far better. The auger bits are expensive and a friend who does this stuff for a living said that none have a reverse. So if the bit gets stuck and you end up digging it out! As our garden is full of brick ends we didn't bother. Dug in 20 posts and only one hole didn't have a brick in it, so we would have wasted our money anyway.

[Declan]

Suziqueue-  i do a lot of percolation tests for drainage fields/septic tank jobs- in my honest opinion and given your heavy clay i think a damn good spade or a mini digger is the answer- ive tried all the post borers- and in clay they're not worth a fiddle- the single or two man ones need to be held onto by an elephant to stop it twizzling you round and to help it do down- the larger ones are next to useless when they hit any size of a stone- the stone gets jammed between the auger and the wall/shaft of the hole.
TO be honest i've reverted back to the spade- and for anything deeper than about 3ft i go for the mini-digger hire option. the smallest mini digger will do your job better than any post hole borer---- in my opinion only of course.

Declan

[suziequeue]

Thanks all. I will be rethinking my approach :-)

[robert waddell]

the electricity boards used to have purpose built lorry mounted augers for the pole lines fantastic in good conditions hit a stone and they still had to bring in the JCB  and the auger could reverse as well  i think the augers fitted to the mini diggers can reverse as well  with the hydraulic circut they have

[Small Farmer]

The are minidiggers and diggers

We have sloping land on clay over chalk with a lot of flint and the soil conditions change markedly from one area to another.  When we put in an underground tank we got in a bloke with a mini digger to dig the hole.  It didn't have the weight so he had to hire a much bigger machine to do the job.

All the land round here was owned by a large estate which went bust some years ago.  They did a big building spree in the 1870's and put in drains and dug cess pits, lots of them.  Not all the maps survived but we've found five so far between 40 and 60 feet deep and obviously hand-dug.  One we found by hitting the buried capping stone with a mole plough.  It's a bit unnerving to find yourself staring into a big hole where the horse was grazing the day before. 

The main estate farm up the hill has a 150' well.

[suziequeue]

We'll - I rethought my approach and we decided - with some hesitation - to get one.


We got a 10" and a 3" auger and didn't get around to using it for ages but we used it for the first time today to dig holes for our courgettes in accordance with Herrick Kimball's idea for planting squashes


We are in heavy clay soil and I have to say the results were INCREDIBLE.   FANTASTIC 


We dug three big holes. What we learnt was:

• It's a two man job
• Both people have to stand close in to the auger and get it really straight vertical otherwise the bottom flail starts ramming it around
• We used minimum power to get the thing going - and didn't rev it unless absolutely necessary
• We didn't push the auger down into the soil - just let it take itself down with the occasional uppey downey pump action
• To come up we stopped the machine and pulled it up

Perfect holes and no stoppages - now lets hope for perfect courgettes!!!!


You've heard of square foot gardening?......next year we are going to do "hole" veg growing.


Hole food..... 


We are going to grow bunches of carrots in holes etc etc. Everything in holes filled with good stuff...... like growing things in pots but in the soil with masses of worms to mix everything in.

[OhLaLa]

Sounds like you have got it sussed. To make it easier to pull up, do it as you bore down (so you bore down, pull the debris up, bore down, pull the debris up etc etc ), so you finally pull up with the machine on.. That way you remove all the unwanted soil, it's easier for both you and the machine (and the machine is easier to clean as it's not compacted).
Now you know why we wouldn't be without it!! Good call!!