help with boggy lawn please

thifty

Hi everyone
My new house's garden is just boring new house lawn which is like a bog in some areas:eek: so much so that I have been putting wellies on to peg out the washing so have been out with a fork putting holes in the lawn, off to buy some sand and grit tomorrow. Hate to think what rubble may lie underneath if I take the grass up. Has anyone any experience/ advice on what to do with this? The people at the top of my garden (it slopes up towards them) had a load of pea gravel by the sounds of it delivered last week to try to dry things up. They have a line of conifers which run along my fence and the ones near the boggy bit are much weaker looking and smaller too so obviously they have got problems. I have always been used to a flat garden before and have always had borders with shrubs in and had soil which was a free draining sandy loam. This seems to be quite heavy from the one strip that is not covered in grass.
Should I get some sand and put in fork holes in the hope that it dries it up or should I remove some of the lawn in the worst boggy bit, dig it over and add loads of grit? help needed please:)

Mortal

It might be that it's become compacted, and or on clay soil.
You've got a good plan there.
Go over it with either a hollow-tined fork or a garden fork (deep and wiggle back and forth to open up) a couple of inches between each.
Add lime-free sand (lawn sand), brush it into all the holes, and into the soil.

You may well have to do this each spring - I do it along with scarifying it etc.

On a more permanent level, you could dig a soakaway - ditches filled with gravel to help drain the water towards a more suitable place.
If your neighbours have started their drainage, it might make yours worse, as you may well get all their soakaway

Planting plants/trees that like those kind of conditions can help to soak up some of the water too.

If you choose to re-lay the lawn, then take off the turf, improve the soil below with lots of organic matter before re-seeding or re-turfing.

Oh, and just to add. Try not to walk on the grass, you'll compact it further.

thifty

sand plan has had to wait a day and it has nothing but wee it down all day!:mad: Might go around to the neigbours to see what theirs is like before I do anything but the soakaway idea sounds good! thanks. Failing that i will have to do some digging up of lawn and buy a gunnera!:rotfl:

iamana1ias

You need to run perforated pipes through the lawn to carry excess liquid away. Involves digging channels (in the same pattern as a leaf's 'veins') with a slight fall in level, lay gravel, then pipes, then gravel and then put the soil and grass back.

Zanderman

iamana1ias wrote: »

You need to run perforated pipes through the lawn to carry excess liquid away. Involves digging channels (in the same pattern as a leaf's 'veins') with a slight fall in level, lay gravel, then pipes, then gravel and then put the soil and grass back.

Why bother with the trouble and expense of perforated pipes (not very money-saving). Shallow trenches under the turf filled with cheap gravel (buy in bulk, and choose the grey pea gravel they use on roads, not a decorative type, it's much cheaper) would work just fine without pipes.

Leaf-vein pattern would be good - but you might get away with a much simpler pattern - we had a similar problem in a clayey new house lawn a few years back and most was solved with just one french drain (trench with gravel) along one side. All depends on where the water comes in, and the lie of the land.

thifty

the garden is higher in the left side top and slopes gently to the right hand top corner and all of the garden slopes gently towards the house with a reatining wall at the bottom iyswim. After reading the advice i think I am going to dig up a long strip of lawn up from top right where it is boggiest down to bottom right, dig a trench, fill with gravel and hope that sorts it by draining into the house drain at the bottom. Would you put the soil back on top?
Hubbie is also going to drill some holes in the retaining wall at the bottom to see if that makes a difference. Failing this then I think we will go down the pipes route.
thanks everyone for the advice, all I need now is for this awful rain to stop so I can actually get out and do something about it all:rotfl: