I bought a house recently, been here a year, and now is time to do the major changes in the garden.
There was a small slope in the back garden, dropping about 600mm over 12m linear metres, to the rear right corner. I have built a few retaining walls and leveled it.
I now have to bring the entire area (about 100 sq/m) up by around 120mm. The underlying soil is very heavy clay and so i was wondering what the best thing was to bring it up in with regard to improving the soil.
Obviously we are into a fairly large quantity, more than 10t. I have easily available screened top soil, 10mm clean stone, grit sand. I can get rotted manure cheaply and easily too but because i'm coming up so much i don't want it to be all over the place as it rots further. I can't get Compost in any large quantity for a sensible price.
I have had a couple of interesting suggestions. What would you do?
Thanks for your input
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Hi Simon, are we not teaching grandma to suck eggs if we offer advice to you? Here goes anyway.
1.Avoid any great amounts of compost/manure in any area you are going to turn into lawn. As you say it will continue to rot and wreck your levels as it disappears.
2. Incorporating sand and/or stone into the top 4" or so of your current sub grade should be sufficient to sharpen up the drainage, unless you are in a bog. From an environmental point of view resist temptation to put any lateral drainage, even though it would be easy at this stage.
3. Personal opinion but bring up levels with unscreened top soil. Stones in the soil aid drainage and allegedly help soil warm up and stay warm. Screened top soil might look the job at the point of delivery and seeding/planting(and therefore payment point to a customer), but I find it compacts too easily and encourages poor drainage and moss. Cultivate and rake off top stones only.
Thanks john, just wanting to hear others opinions as i have mulled it over with a couple of people and got a variety of suggestions. Intriguingly one was to have a blanket of 20mm stone a couple of inches deep. This sounded good to my wallet too....
Simon.
At the moment we are in the same boat , we are working on a building site all the areas are clay , we have put in land drainage , in between the land drainage we have broken up the ground , after the land drainage we have worked in loads of sand in to the clay and topsoil to improve the drainage ,
Simon Smith said:
Most on the builds on the golf course involved a bed of 20mm stones and or drainage with 70/30 soil/sand on top, It's an expensive way of doing it, but the results are always very impressive.
Don't go down the compost route as chances are it will sink....
I'm happy to send you some pictures of past projects if that helps. :)
Simon
I presume you have graded the existing heavy soil to create a level area i.e allowing for the top imported soil to be laid to an even depth.
I would first spread and incorporate washed sand into the clay base to try and open this up. this will help with drainage and at the same time assist with root growth of the lawn.
I would then bring in a 70/30 sand soil mix spread and compacted by heal and toe in two layers. Tarmac supplies do a good sand/soil mix that is used in the lot of football pitch construction.
Hope this helps.
Thanks for your thoughts. Yes at the moment it is graded pretty level. Once done it will be seeded not turfed.
Robbie what sort of depths are we talking? could you describe the make up?
This was the new 3rd Tee we built on the dufferin at Clandeboye...
A pictures is better than a 1000 words...
There is a deeper bed of stones than you would need, we used additional stones to provide extra height.
I miss all the 'toys' we had that makes jobs like this so easy lol...
Your going to want at least 4" of compacted soil, although 5" would be better...
We always turfed everything...
I lifted this from the website, after the grow in...