Digging up garden for new lawn - Help needed!

tkane

Hi there,

Our back garden has been neglected for quite some time and we have finally decided to do it up properly. Now, it's all plain grass but full of weeds and not attracitve at all. So, instead of just cutting the grass etc, we have decided to take the whole lot out and put in a brand new lawn.

This is where you helpful people come in

Digging up the ground extensivly enough to get rid of all the weeds (there's a lot of the stuff!) would be a rather tyring thing to do manually. We have therefore been looking at tillers and came across this wonderful looking thing:

http://www.hss.com/index.php?p=62516

Since I have never done anything like this before, I was wondering whether anyone could tell me whether the above linked machine would do the job for us? Would it be suitable for digging up ground with grass on it? Also, is it worth the money? For one day's Hire it would come in at £70 delivered including VAT.

Thanks for any help :beer:

G42

Using a machine like that will turn the ground over alright but will also mix in the grass and weeds which are liable to grow through again. After that the ground will have to be well tramped down or rolled lightly, raked, stones removed, levelled, seeded/turfed. Are you sure that the grass can't be salvaged with the use of a weedkiller (must be one for use on grass) and a grass fertiliser?

rdpro

Agreed - a lot of weeds (bindweed, etc.) will grow a new plant from *each* fragment of the original after being broken up in any way - either be prepared to sieve all the tilled soil to remove any root/plant material or you can cover it in black plastic sheeting if you have an outbreak of good sunshine (the heat will kill the weeds), or just use a selective (systemic) weedkiller - grass is a 'C4' plant whereas Joe Weed is a C3 plant (metabolic differences), therefore weedkillers have been developed that only interfere with C3 metabolism. Glyphosate weedkillers are the best, as they don't remain in the soil very long and degrade on drying - they're very poisonous to aquatic life though.

I knew that Botany A level would come in handy eventually

Mojisola

I would be inclined to use a lawn feed and weed - maybe several applications if it's really bad - and be prepared to spread some seed if necessary to thicken up the grass that's left.

tkane

I would definitely go with the weed killer option as it would be cheaper. However, many of my friends have warned me that they're extremely hard to get rid of even with the most powerful of weed killers. Seeing as we have so many of them, I thought it would be better to just dig them all out.

Also, I like the idea of a black sheet to kill them off....is it effective?

notisis

With ours we dug all weeds out by hand, put down weed killer (several times), dug it over, left dormant with black plastic sheeting for a year, going out regularly to dig up the roots (mostly brambles) by hand. Eventually it was good enough to dig over. We then followed the instructions for laying turf (digging over, adding mulch, fertiliser, levelling etc). Hard work but worth it. All in all it took a good 2 years to get a decent lawn but then our back garden had been full of brambles!

tomsolomon

I'm afraid there is no easy way to say this........
If you kill everything off with weed killer, you will not be able to put your lawn down. The only way to get rid of the weeds and grass is to get digging unfortunately.
I did this two years ago and am only just getting the lawn right now. Dandelion roots go down a very long way, Even if you put your fork in all the way chances are you will not hit the bottom of the roots on some of them, and if you leave the roots in, they will grow back.
Our lawn is 6m x 10m and took me almost a week to dig over, only then was it tilled, rolled, raked and seeded. But we still had loads of dandelions, because of the seeds that blew in from the surrounding area.
This year however I applied some Evergreen complete and it has all but banished the little blighters.
Its alot of hard work but very much worth it when see the results. Dont what ever you do, cut corners though, you need to follow the rules to a t or you could end up having to do the lot again.

Blackjack_Davy

tkane wrote: »

Digging up the ground extensivly enough to get rid of all the weeds (there's a lot of the stuff!) would be a rather tyring thing to do manually. We have therefore been looking at tillers and came across this wonderful looking thing:

http://www.hss.com/index.php?p=62516

Since I have never done anything like this before, I was wondering whether anyone could tell me whether the above linked machine would do the job for us? Would it be suitable for digging up ground with grass on it? Also, is it worth the money? For one day's Hire it would come in at £70 delivered including VAT.:

That will be fine. You could alternatively dig it of course and gain some exercise and save yourself some money in the process. Remember that the rotovator (or digging) will leave some very uneven soil, so you'll need to level the soil with a rake/back of a fork and then compact the soil (walk up and down on it, rake it again, repeat until a level compact surface is reached) so theres no getting away from some physical labour at least. Then either buy in and lay some turf for that "instant" effect or sow seed (cheaper, but takes time to germinate and thicken up, weeds can be a problem too.)

The most important thing first though: apply a glyphosate weedkiller (Tumbleweed, RoundUp, etc) to kill all perennial weeds first.

tomsolomon wrote: »

I'm afraid there is no easy way to say this........
If you kill everything off with weed killer, you will not be able to put your lawn down. The only way to get rid of the weeds and grass is to get digging unfortunately.

Not true, only with long lasting weedkillers such as, for example, dichlobenyl. Glyphosate is very effective and not long lasting. You can lay turf/sow seed immediately.

tomsolomon

Blackjack_Davy wrote: »

Not true, only with long lasting weedkillers such as, for example, dichlobenyl. Glyphosate is very effective and not long lasting. You can lay turf/sow seed immediately.

I put weed killer on the lawn the dandelions had a growth spurt and turned to seed almost overnight, before they eventually died.
Not a good idea if you intend digging up the lawn and re-seeding.
The other way would be to use a quick acting spot weed killer, but then if your going to go round the entire lawn you may as well dig them up....:D
Depends how good a result you want realy.

dander

Lawn weeds are pretty persistant. If you are planning to redo the lawn from scratch, really the best thing you can do is cover the whole lot with black plastic or something similar and leave it for a good long time - if you got it down now you could probably be reseeding your lawn next spring. As notisis says, you will get a good lawn this way.

The trouble with weedkillers is that they generally only kill what's above ground at the time of application, so usually take several applications to start working. This also means if you rotovate, then weedkill, you won't get to the plants, because they'll be stirred up and buried.

If your lawn is reasonably flat and in the right place and the problem is just the normal lawn weeds, I would recommend just kicking into a serious lawncare regime. Spot weeders are brilliant for bigger leaved weeds like plaintain, daisies and dandelions. You can also simply dig these out one by one - which is, of course free, but will take a long time if you've got a big lawn. Smaller weeds can be tackled with selective weedkillers. Mow the lawn regularly, at least once a week - this will knock annual weeds on the head, they'll just give up trying. Feed the lawn - aerate it if neccessary.

Take a trip to the local library, they'll usually have a copy of the Lawn Expert Hessayon. Lots of good tips in there.