New garden

June 29th, 2009

New garden


I have made some real progress with our garden, we now have grass.  It was kind of an accident, we were told about a turf farm that’s not to far away and we were in that area.  We ended up with 20 rolls of turn in out boot with not a lot of an idea with what to do with it.  In the end we found that it is surprisingly easy to lay turf, it’s just all the preparation before hand.


We knew we were going to get some turf so had done quite a bit of preparation already.  I had turned the entire area over to mix in all the sand that was left from taking up the patio.  I had sieved out a huge pile of large stones and raked it pretty flat.  I still wasn’t happy with it completely because there were still quite a few lumps and stones in it which I thought with show thought the grass when it was finished.  After 2 hours of two of us digging, sieving and raking we finally got it looking really good and flat.


Now came the part I was worried about laying the turf.  I had read a couple of Internet guides about how to go about putting it down and they talked about putting down a straight line to start with and making sure you didn’t put thin sections at the edges.  I had also looked at the weather forecast which for putting down turf wasn’t too good, 5 days of lots of sun and very high temperatures.  Luckily I had read about moisture retaining stuff that is used in hanging baskets to absorb water and release it again gradually, it was also on offer at B&Q so I brought two packs to scatter down with the pre turf fertiliser.


We didn’t really use a straight line for a starting point, instead we gave ourselves a big margin of error my putting down more than we needed.  Between every section we made sure they were well butted up to each other and just kept going until we had covered everywhere.


During the week I have watered the garden every morning and evening to try to stop it drying out, but it was just too hot and the turves have shrunk leaving big gaps.  In an attempt to fix them I have used a mixture of compost, soil and grass seed to fill the gaps.  If it doesn’t work then at least filling the gaps will stop moisture evaporating from underneath the soil.

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