Back garden, advice needed!

davejh666

davejh666

davejh666

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Joined
17 Nov 2011
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Timbucktoo
Hi all,

After some gardening advice. First off, I know nothing about gardens/gardening or how to turn the mess we are getting into something decent for the kids to play in.

Okay, we are moving to a new house next weekend. It has quite a large back garden, about 25 ft wide by about 100ft long. It is overgrown, with quite a few patches of mud with large stones and bricks thrown in for good measure!

My obvious plans are to remove all the bricks I can see and cut the grass! I am borrowing a lawn mower from the FIL (an old one he said he doesn't mind if it gets knackered up), so if there are any stones left then it won't matter so much.

So, what is the best way to go about trying to sort this mess out? I can't post a pic at the moment til we move now. I thought about just getting someone in to re-turf the entire back garden, but guess that would cost a fortune? I don't mind hard work so would do it myself, but not sure what you would have to do?

Another thing, if it makes any difference, we met the neighbour today who told us the garden gets fairly sodden in wet weather and it is clay underneath, if that makes a difference?
 
Sounds very much like my garden. Ours comes in at around 140ft x 25ft and after about a foot of topsoil is a near infinite layer of clay as far as I can tell. We have been here six years and it has taken time, but its amazing how the grass has changed and generally recovered in this time. I would concentrate on just cleaning up and getting the grass down in the first instance. I think re-turfing the entire area would be a) overkill and b) likely to be problematic until you identify the real bog spots and their severity. The water can be redirected easily enough with some French drains, though redirection is the best you can hope for with clay, so think carefully about where you're diverting it to unless you fancy a pond. :) Pay particular attention to any boggy bits that are likely to see a lot of foot traffic as these will soon turn into bald patches beyond the one week of the year we see the sun.

EDIT

Link below was useful to me for drainage. As per Nightglows post, we used a kind of French drain hybrid with perforated pipe.
Fortunately there is a land drain that runs under several houses above us and turns in our backyard before heading to the road, so we were able to connect into that

http://www.pavingexpert.com/drain03.htm
 
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Cheers guys, will look into both of those things you have linked to, and get some photo's up when we get in next weekend.

Basically it is a very rural location, and at the back of the garden is a farmers field (there are fields all around). The fences all need replacing at the back and one side, and an old washing line needs removing also.
 
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