Posts Tagged ‘clay soil’

Will a small Bobcat type loader with a bucket/backhoe dig through drought-solid Georgia clay dirt?

We had planned to some landscaping work around our house, levelling some areas and putting up brick retaining walls… but with the Southeast drought, the dirt is now solid as a brick.

Definitely too solid to do anything with regular shovels, and we would have rented a Bobcat or similar small backhoe anyway. But now we’re wondering whether even those things can break through the dirt. I know really large equipment can — they’re doing construction all around and they move and recontour huge tracts of dirt like it’s sand. But that kind of equipment is WAY out of our budget.

We like to do it ourselves, so we’ll rent equipment if it can do the job.

Does anyone out there have experience with this smaller consumer-rentable equipment (1500-2500 lbs) and with Southeast clay soil in very dry conditions? Will it do the job? Or should we wait until it rains?

We have about a 40×40 area to recontour about 4-8 ft high.