A monster garden... need some advice!

Hi everyone.
I have been lurking around the forum for a while and finally decided to join and post, so hello all!
Basically I'm after some advice, we have just moved into a house that has a monster of a garden. It climbs from ground level to about 3m in the space of 13 steps and then goes up in three mores tiers until pretty much roof height. What we have done so far is excavate 13 tons of soil from the side of the house to the bottom tier of the garden where will will level it out and lose a tier, hopefully giving us some flat space that we can seed ( if i ever see a wheel barrow again it will be too soon)
We are building a retaining wall from sleepers at the bottom of the garden but are at a loss with how to retain the top half! We were thinking of using machine round poles or landscaping poles driven into the ground, that way we could shape the garden and level it off but I'm not sure if this will do the job. The other problem we have is money, having just moved we are pretty much operating on a minimal budget so if any body can give me any advice of what to do with this garden it would really, really be appreciated!

This is the top half of the garden with all the soil we have to spread out and level.


And this is the space we excavated where the retaining wall will be built.


See what i mean? Monster Garden!
thanks again.

 

Hi Aaoi and welcome. it is certainly a big job you have taken on, have you really moved all that soil with that spade? :D

It is difficult to see the overall size of the area and exactly what you are tryng to do from the two photos. What are you going to use the spaces for, are you going to create lawns with borders for instance? Also, would sloping banks be easier than retaining walls? A rough plan / sketch of the area would be really useful if you can.

 

Gardens :snz:

Show me Greyhounds :D:D:D:luv:

 

Actually no, we hired a micro digger for the day but I thought if I left the spade there I could try and convince my parents that Iâ??d worked really hard!

We cleared the space at the base of the garden because one of our dogs has arthritis and can't tackle the steps, ideally we wanted the whole area cleared but unknown to us there was a giant floating water mains pipe so we could only go so far. But we do want to turf that area so he has a small place to snooze in the sun.
As for the top.. well i would like some borders and a path eventually with maybe some shrubs or something along the front of the garden because when you get to the top of it, it feels like your on a mountain! I'm not really sure about the retaining walls myself, the tiers are actually quite short so we were afraid that slopes would give us too little room to play with. The space as a whole is about 14 meters wide and about 30 meters long. We used to live in a flat so this is all new to me.
Oh and yes, greyhounds are the coolest

 

Hi Aaoi welcome to the forum.

My goodness you're not afraid of hard work are you? Well done what you have been able to do so far.

I'm sure if Pro Gard is knocking about he will be able to give you some ideas to help solve your garden problem.

It's got to be lovely to have a house now and I'm sure your dog will enjoy his little patch of green 'stuff' too no matter how small that might be.Hel.xxx.

 

I would do all the tiers with rail sleapers, easier and longer lasting than anything else.

Up to two sleapers high on edge Id use rebar spikes driven in behind and fencing stapled to the sleapers to suport to suport, over two high id use steel angle iron driven or concreted in and coach bolted through to the sleapers.

Another option if you can get some help to manouver them is to use telegraph poles.

Youll find loads of slepers for sale on ebay, many at good prices, I use hillcard being reasnably local to me and keenly priced.

 

hi Aaoi all i can say is get plenty of Radox in your going to Ned it good luck :flag:

 

Having mulled over this for the past few days we did decide to try and do the job ourselves using sleepers and hopefully they will arrive in the next few days ready for us to start our mission. So thanks for the advice so far, especially for recommending ebay, i never thought to look there for sleepers!

Although quite hard work, i am finding it quite rewarding and I'm quite looking forward to one day being able to actually plant something. I'm am not, however, enjoying having dirt in my shoes all the time, and dirty doggy footprints...
Thanks again everyone!