New lawn help

[Chilledbud]

Hi there, sorry for a slightly muddled post but I've a relative that's just been taken ill.

 

Having purchased a house with a little bit of land, we where faced with the nightmare of the previous owners letting everything over growing.

 

6ft wide leylandii hedges shadowed by anti-social leylandii trees and a jungle of no idea what plants.

 

Having done most of the work of clearing it, we where faced with going into Winter with a messy lower garden full of broken roots, twigs and uneven broken clay soil. This resulted in a Winter of having a pond in the garden, with the grass section also pretty much waterlogged due to clay.

 

We now have 60 tonnes of topsoil from the site of the new Cinema and Supermarket coming, of course it's not grade A and not filtered, but on a budget it's the best we can do.

 

I have a 1.5t mini-digger for a week, and was wondering what advice people can offer?

 

I was wondering if the grass section you can see with the soil dump needs rotavating as I'd need to hire one before spreading some of the acquired soil. Maybe running the digger track over it a few times prior instead of a rotavator, can we get away with trying to get it as level as possible with new, and raking it as much as we can over Summer to try and get rid of the stone.

 

Are the digger tracks going to be good enough for compressing the soil, or infact too much?

 

 

The part that used to be a jungle and can just be seem as soil in the picture isn't going to be grass but a slightly raised veg plot and the other half a Chicken coop and large-ish run. Part of me wonders if we would be best letting the chickens of the land that will be grass in the future for the Summer and then seed it come Autumn?

 

[ferret1958uk]

My first post to this forum. As you appear to have all of the basic (usually expensive stuff) on site then I would suggest trying to mix the top soil in to the ground so that is is at least a foot down.

 

One of my customers had a clay based soil with a lawn that was always dying due to waterlogging. I mowed the lawn as short as I could (scalped it) and then spread earth over the entire area so that it was around an inch deep. The site was then dug over using a spade to a depth of around 12 inches. I then repeated with another inch of soil and rotavated that in at a depth of 7 or 8 inches. The whole site was then gently compacted and very well watered and left to settle for a few days. Once I had sorted out the few remaining lumps I spread another thin coat of top soil before laying turf.

 

That was in April 2013 and the lawn has drained well through winter, and I am happy to report that the roots for the turf have got down to 7 inches which is about where they need to be to cope with a hot summer.

 

It is a lot of work, and perhaps too much for the area you have. The baked clay surface will need to be broken up, and provided you can work some good soil into the top 8 inches then any grass/ turf will have space to grow its roots.

[Hobbsurf]

PM 're grass seed for lawns.

 

I owned a lawn care franchised business for 4 years and may be able to help.

 

Russ

[Chilledbud]

I though I should update this with a quick picture of how it looks now!

 

600 native hedge plants later, 40 tonnes of soil, 20 tonnes of compost and here it is.

 

 

 

We now have 15 fruit trees, 8 in the nearest part of the photo and 7 new ones at the far end of the garden.

 

The nearest part is a couple weeks old wildflower meadow, so only grass growing thus far, but a few weeks or months there should be a lot more colour, I've also made a couple of strips of wildflowers road side where there was only bad grass last year.

 

Where we levelled the garden with compost the grass is a million times better than the old soil.

 

20 chickens are now doing their best to compost the whole garden, and as a 5-10 year project it should come along nicely.