Complete garden overhaul

londonlydia

We're completely overhauling our garden, and so it will be like building a garden from scratch. So I've been doing lots of planning and designing! But I do have a few questions.

The history: we bought our first house just over 18months ago, and whilst the house was great (but needed some urgent work, hence delay to garden) the garden was awful and falling away. The house is on a hill, and the retaining wall holding the garden up on 2 sides was failing (other side is an alley which is our land). So as I speak the builders are finishing off rebuilding this, and putting in new fencing to match the left side (which is Ok). The garden is overlooked, and infested with bind weed under the badly laid slabs at the bottom. The lawn is awful, clay soil infested with an encyclopaedia of lawn weeds. The garden is about 48ft long, east facing...but bottom gets sun most of day due to the way the houses are.

Plan: we plan to flatten the garden out into 3 flat levels ( with a slight angle for surface run off). 1st level by the house will have a small shed and be covered in gravel and pots. Level 2 will be lawn and bed against South facing fence, and third level will be decked for outdoor dining and bbqs.

Questions:

1) we are planning to hire a rotivator to tear up current ground before flattening out. Due to bind weed at lower end, should we try and do a good weeding before?

2) due to clay soil, I was planning to rotivate and add sand before compacting and adding a layer of good topsoil...then turf/ bed. I'm trying to get the best conditions I can, so is this the right approach? I should add I'm running irrigation for the beds at the same time.

3) I want bamboo on east side for a bit more privacy, but I don't want it too dense so it will take all the light out. Any suggestions on bamboo? I'd prefer clump forming, with a max height of 2-3m.

...I've probably got a million more but these I will post as I go along. I know it's a lot of work but both my partner and I are keen DIYers, love a project, and I'm a keen gardener normally so itching to use the outdoor space which up until now has been unusable!

closetouch

I would definately weed out as much of the bindweed as possible. If you rotovate you will make the problem much worse as bindweed grows from even the tiniest bit of root. If you are happy to use it glyphosate will kill it, takes a few weeks. My only other thought is that grit may be better than sand.

I_have_spoken

should we try and do a good weeding before?

Essential. But don't try digging out bindweed, glyphosate the lot

londonlydia

Ah yes I've bought a large amount of roundup for the end part of the garden...once we've lifted the slabs up the bind weed roots are exposed/ mostly sitting on the surface it seems ( as wall is been rebuilt we got a usual cross section view through the soil!). Would it best to liberally spray the roots with the roundup? I know normally you would go for the leaves but I'm not sure how many leaves remain in comparison...

I_have_spoken

I may be wrong but I think it's green leaves that absorb the chemicals. You may need to be patient and let the bindweed twirl up canes then spray.

When I relayed the lawn, I used 6cm of coarse grit to help drainage over the clay base, but in Kent you may not get anything like the rain I do