New comer to gardening needs help with overgrown garden

Well we have recently moved into our new home with a 42 meter squared garden. Sadly the previous owner did not take care of the garden and it is mostly over grown, their are some good patches of grass but its mostly weeds.

I have been able to cut through it all and well i think it needs some real tender loving care.

I would like some advice concerning weed control and saftey for children firstly, we have a one year old and have a few broad leaf weeds and dandelions and nettles, i would like to keep them to a minimum without killing off the grass but also keeping it chemical free, Possible?

I have started removing some segments of soil which were totally lost and have weeded it and started planted some grass seeds which have now grown to one inch in length so i am quite happy there. I was considering large scale sheeting on some areas but the black membrane sheeting i had considered is expensive and i am doing this on a limited budget. So any other ideas for killing of the most and weeds and making the soil suitable for growing grass again would be most helpful.

I have started to dig out a border for planting some flowers its 10 inches wide all around atm, i think i will need some compost? because of the soils condition and how dry and neglected it was. Their is also alot of red clay in the soil and rocks from what appears to be when the concrete posts went in for the fencing.

With the border i would like some ideas for nice attractive short to tall flowers or small trees that would be safe for a small child to look at; he is presntly 14months and very well behaved thankfully but loves nature.

So question what flowers would be good and how would you prepare the border and prepare it for flowering and how deep do you recommend.

One plus is that we have alot of nice meadow ants that are doing a great job repairing segments of the soil, sadly the niger lavius ants are abudent and not as helpful so i would love to encourage more meadow ants in the soil.

We are also not subject to a hose pipe ban at present.

Many Thanks

 

Welcome to Gardeners Corner

 

Hello and welcome

 

just keeping the ground cut short with a rotary mower will kill a lot of weeds, nettles cannot stand being cut for long, best thing with thistles is pull them up, they cannot feed the roots if the leaves are repeatedly pulled and will starve.

 

post a photo or two, then we can get a better idea