Small holes though stony soil

[Tim Streater]

We're putting up a fruit cage and the soil is stony clay. The cage uses ally pipes with a pointy shaped plastic bung in the bottom. In ordinary soil you'd just push these in to a depth of 1ft (300mm).

As this is stony clay, we already discovered when putting in raised beds that you can't just biff pointy bits of wood into it - I had to dig a hole for each.

I don't fancy digging another 9 holes for the cage poles, any suggestions for something I can use to make a 25mm hole in such conditions? The stones appear to be a mixture of flint and bits of brick.

[Jonathan]

Get a metal bar/rod that you can hammer in with a sledge hammer. I've used one for fencing for years.

Jonathan

[Spamlet]

What the others said, and also: I had a garden fork with quite a good metal sleeve on the bottom. When the fork part broke off, I hammered the metal sleeve straighter, then put a big bolt through the shaft higher up. I now have an excellent dibber which I can operate with my foot on the big bolt. I mainly use it for getting big carrots in stony clay like yours.

S

[michael adams]

What I did to sink 5 cm diameter plastic pipe into the soil to act as fence poles was use a 3ft section of the pipe to function as a hollow auger.

Basically I cut "teeth" at one end, which basically just meant cutting half of it away and chamfering off the remaining cutting edges , not that hard to do with plastic anyway. No great theoretical knowledge involved, just trial and error.

I then drilled a hole across i.e. through both sides near the other end, to take a bar to act as a handle. This was then simply screwed down into the ground, and withdrawn after every 6 inches or so and the core knocked out. I seem to remember I may have poured water into the hole to act as a lubricant. It worked remarkably well and the fence posts went in quite easily. This was in stony soil as well I might add and the holes went down well over one foot.

michael adams

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[Dave Osborne]

Use an SDS drill with rotation stop as a jack hammer.

[michael adams]

What I did to sink 5 cm diameter plastic pipe into the soil to act as fence poles was use a 3ft section of the pipe to function as a hollow auger.

Oops! Better make that "core drill" rather than "hollow auger".

Basically I cut "teeth" at one end, which basically just meant cutting half of it away and chamfering off the remaining cutting edges , not that hard to do with plastic anyway. No great theoretical knowledge involved, just trial and error.

I then drilled a hole across i.e. through both sides near the other end, to take a bar to act as a handle. This was then simply screwed down into the ground, and withdrawn after every 6 inches or so and the core knocked out. I seem to remember I may have poured water into the hole to act as a lubricant. It worked remarkably well and the fence posts went in quite easily. This was in stony soil as well I might add and the holes went down well over one foot.

michael adams

...

[Tim Streater]

I know some klods say that usenet is dying but it seems to me that the responses here demonstrate why that would be so bad: IME, more useful than you see on web forums and so on.

Thanks for all the ideas which will be sifted and applied.