appalling soil, want a lawn..

after obtaining relavant permissions for a few projects we can make a start with the garden.

we want a lawn for most of it with a small paved area:

This is the plan we went with above.

the lawn is approx 7m x 5m
with two drainage access covers on the left

and the paved area and rear path to a gate on the right.

the paved area is easy enough as that obviously doesn't need good soil to exist.

the lawn however does and now that we have ripped up the patio which covered the entire site we have found there is just hardcore underneath ( expected )
what was not expected is that there is nothing but hardcore for 300mm+
or very little else at least.

as seen here as we started digging the area for the paving:




so hard to dig!!

and what we have dug already, took the best part of two days and this is just the beginning!

 

This could be what you need.

http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/FREE-DELI...rden_Plants_Fertiliser_CV&hash=item53f6ec5835

Bought it for my garden which was nothing but severely compacted red clay with no structure to it at all. Stuff grows out there now.

 

thanks Clueless

that seems a great idea, I had budgeted £400 for 5 x 1000kg of topsoil
would you happen to know what quantity I would require of the compost
and how I would use it?

thanks again!

 

You reckoning that the previous people put down that much hardcore to make a good, stable, terrace? or that the builders buried all their rubble there? (Is it a relatively new-build?)

I'd look for someone nearby making a path / drive / terrace that wants some hardcore. Maybe they are digging up topsoil for their terrace and you can have that? (Its not uncommon to find topsoil available on Freecycle or similar - it costs money to have it carted away, and much more Eco to recycle it locally anyway).

You need topsoil, in place of the hardcore, to make a lawn. Mushroom compost will imrpove soil but it on't convert hardcore into something that plants will thrive in IMO. You don't need the topsoil to be beautiful black fenland peat best quality lots-of-wonga topsoil though whatever your nearest neighbour is getting rid of will do, but you don't want his subsoil, only his topsoil.

 

most likely builders waste as its on a mainly council estate, only a handful of us own.

and therein lies the problem

none of the neighbours so much as get out of bed a lot of the time
let alone do some gardening.

mind you, one obviously wanted to something though as they stole my bleedin ladders!
the topsoil i had looked at would be £300 for the top soil at a depth of 100mm over the entire area..
so i would dig out to 100mm and skip the waste, then loosen the subsoil/ground below
and dump in the topsoil...or is that totally the wrong approach?

 

You need to get the hardcore out and replace it. A lawn won't grow in a few inches of topsoil over hardcore (well, it will, but it will never "look" anything). But if the lower layer is stone mixed in with soil then that should work. Depends what sort of "quality" of hardcore you have deeper down. If its proper hardcore (type-1 aggregate or similar) all the way down for 300mm then I reckon it needs to come out (because it hardcore packs down to make a "solid" layer)

 

thats the thing, Ive dug a hole down and its stoney all the way through, replacing any further than 200mm would be costly and we wouldn't see that return in a years rental
so its a balancing act between looking good and cost, but as we will be letting to small families idealy we know a lawn would be beneficial to both us and the tenant.

yeah its mainly 20mm/less aggregate so similar to type 1

would screening be of any benefit? and then discarding of the hardcore?

 

I think you could include the "stone" in with the "soil", presumably its the sandy / smaller particles that actually bind it? Not my area of expertise.

 

No chance of putting your terrace / deck / some "hard" feature where the hardcore, or to cover where the majority of the hardcore, is? (You could then buy less topsoil, but use it the full 300mm deep)

 

the ground is the same over the over the entire site, a right pain.

i think what ill do is dig down to 200-300mm and use a 3:1 ratio of compost and topsoil to refill

hopefully providing i loosen the ground at 300mm and add some drainage we should be good
thats a good 12 inches of topsoil & compost ..

gosh I never would have thought gardening was so hard,
much more complicated than the average joe like me would believe! hats off.

if push comes to shove and a lawn is a no go, decked it shall be
but im just not a fan of decking ... rats/mice!

 

How annoying :(

9" would do I think (provided sub-soil beneath it, rather than concrete :heehe: or something else solid, like hardcore).

Trouble is, you can just put a "bit" of soil there, but you'll be disappointed with the plants - and maybe the layman would never know "why" and just assume it was because he wasn't a skilled gardener :(

Gravel it? and dig some individual planting holes, which were properly generous, and plant some big-ish things in the holes (if they are big-ish then you don't need many holes, nor close together)

You could make a feature of it and (if you like that sort of thing) do for desert type plants, so that it looked like it was deliberate

Actually, you could use bark instead of gravel ... that way it would look like any other "flower bed" that was covered with low-maintenance bark mulch to keep the weeds down.

 

Reminds me a bit of my ground. I used to think my house was standing on top of an old brick factory sometimes! To me I wonder if that is more of a natural occurrence, if it was dumped, then you would have a larger concentrate of it in one area than another. But then again there are some people who when they build a patio have to build it so it survives a holocaust and it might be that this is the case.

Switch the ratio round so it's 3:1 soil and compost. Otherwise your lawn will sink down very quickly as the compost is broken down further. I would also add a few bags of manure in there too to open up the soil.

To me your soil looks like it's made of really tough clay, with stone mixed in. I personally don't see that as a big deal. You're making life a lot more harder on yourself by digging the soil over in dry weather. Your clay soil has probably been baked rock hard and is therefore a nightmare to dig. Either wait for a really good downpour or give it a nightly soaking with the hose (although I don't recommend this as I see it as a waste of mains water/don't like hoses).

If you are eager to get it dug out asap, then get yourself a pickaxe, I have one and use it for digging over baked clay. I have lots of rubble in the ground too and a pick axe is ideal for breaking the ground around this. Also invest in a trench spade, this is also good for cutting through really heavily compacted soil. I had to dig over an area in my garden that had had a garage base on top of it for 50 years and these are the two tools I would strongly recommend. Costs about £20 brand new.

In my opinion what you are doing at the moment is not gardening, I would say more landscaping. A lot of people seem to confuse the two for some reason. When you approach a new site like this one you have to do the grafting first before you can do gardening on it. I always saw that as my aim when I was pulling up 80ft of concrete driveway on my own.

Whatever you do, don't give up and except a compromise like decking the whole thing. I've seen so many people do it who were reluctant to put the effort in in the first place, regretting it when they have to stare at it every day. Anything is achievable if you really want it and are willing to put the effort into getting it.

To me decking is only really used now on sites where you have no useable ground at all. I drew out a design recently for an ex landfill site which only had 20cm of top soil on top of rubbish, which is mainly decked. To me in comparison with to this your soil is workable.

 

I'd get a JCB ... much more fun

 

this was what I meant, sorry obviously wasnt clear there.

the problem is , the more I remove the costs of getting rid of it will rocket
as its on a mountain grab trucks refuse to come up.

so that means using builders skips (£280 + VAT around here each fill and i work out at £1000 )
where as a grab truck would quite literally be £140+vat for up to 16m3

by the time i factor in material and machinery costs im looking at £2500-£3000 for a lawn I'll never use myself hence me trying my best to keep costs low.

would digging out 300mm and sifting it, removing all large debri but keeping the soil
and then back filling with a mixture of the original soil, compost and bought in topsoil
( this bringing costs down likely by half ) :

my budget right now is as follows:

fence: £250 ( all inclusive )
paved area £250 ( Im in the trade so get pretty good prices )
lawn preparation £400 ( topsoil £280 for 4 x tonne bags ) and around £150 for compost
lawn itself - up to £300 depending on seed or turf
machinery - £300skips: up to £600 but if i can wangle a grab truck £180

that comes in at £ 1800 - £2100


sorry if im missing something, I seem to be thinking this too hard and getting lost