"42_Mike" wrote in
:

Now I know the best way is to get a BobCat or small JCB in and remove
the top inc plants, but the only access is via a small gate, and im
sorry, but I don't fancy removing the old stuff by hand!

If it's a mature garden gone to seed, even if you did kill everything off,
you are still going to have a major task removing all the dead stuff before
you can install your new lawn. Woody plants don't just vanish when they
die: they can hang around for years.

If it is just overgrown grass and annual weeds, I'd suggest rather than
weedkill it, you strim it down then run a mower over it. Mow it a couple
more times, and it will soon start looking more like a lawn than a jungle,
and if the turf is not up to your standards, you can then rotovate it.

I have done this myself to an old horrible overgrown vegetable patch, and
it really does look like a real lawn now (one year on).

But if you've got shrubs, big brambles and trees in there, they will be
just as horrible to get rid of dead as alive, and if you reduce them to
ground level, they will not survive regular mowing anyway.

If you really can't get a digger in, you are going to have to do a certain
amount of manual removal.

Only when you've beaten the jungle down is it a matter of deciding whether
you want to remove roots manually, dose with weedkiller, just keep mowing
the damn things, or cover everything in black plastic to stop them coming
back.

But if you were planning to get someone in for the 'rotovate' bit anyway,
it may be worth getting a quote for the whole job. 'Garden clearance' is a
service offered by several people round here.

Victoria