Turfing over wood chip?

Hi all

I have bought a house where the back end of the garden has wood chip. It was previously used for a children's play park.

Anyway, I have checked and the wood chip is about 5inch deep. Its an area around 30m square. There's probably a couple of inchs drop from the grass part to the base left of wood chips.

I am told that putting some top soil the turfing straight over the wood chip is a good solution but i am not sure. Its pretty compact as it has been undisturbed for the last couple of years.

Any advice or points in the right direction would be much appreciated and let me know if pictures would help.

many thanks

Will.

 

I don't think that topsoil over woodchip, and turf over that, will work well.

If you remove the wood chip, replacing it with 5" of topsoil, then you should be in good shape for turfing. Whilst you have the woodchip removed it would be a good idea to loosen up the bottom of the area, before putting the top soil in.

For 5" deep you will need approx one cu.m. (a "builder's bag") for each 7.8 sq.m. of area

 

You'd think that wood chips would starve the ground of nitrogen as they decompose, thus starving the grass. I'm sure that's true to some extent, but I have bark chips on my son's play area floor, and grass is appearing in great clumps in it.

I think, me being a bit tight, I'd probably stick a back of compost over the top and then a sand and grass seed mix on top of that and see what happens.

 

Indeed, but I was more concerned that it would restrict root-run (turf may dry out, and also be starved of nutrients as a result) and as the bark decomposes the turf will sink.