On 30 May 2004 03:43:27 -0700, paulr wrote:

I have just bought a house with a 60` x 25` garden and it currently
has about 3 foot tall weeds covering all of it apart from a couple of
trees.

Any ideas on how to clear it. The idea is to returf the whole garden.
Should i hire a petrol strimmer and clear it then turf it? or go at it
with a lot of weed killer and wait a few weeks?

If you can afford it, hire a garden maintenance guy to do the
hard dirty work of cutting down the weeds and hauling them away.
Your new garden is only 1500 sqft, and the job shouldn't take
long with proper power equipment. Once the weeds are gone, the
situation will become much more manageable.

As for turfing, in the long run you might do better by seeding a
new lawn. The most sensible advice I've seen on this subject was
published years ago in one of our local papers by the late Jack
Beastall. He recommended that you kill off the existing
vegetation in the late spring or early summer, then till the soil
thoroughly (adding amendments to taste), and levelling it.

You then start a regimen that goes on all summer, watering,
fertilizing, and hoeing the soil regularly. The idea is to
encourage weed seeds to germinate freely, then kill the seedlings
via the hoe. By reducing the weed-seediness of the soil, when you
sow your grass seed around the beginning of September, you get
many fewer weeds coming up.

The hoeing is important; repeated use of weedkillers is not as
good. Not only does regular hoeing kill young weed seedllings,
but it also disturbs the soil and exposes more weed seeds,
thereby encouraging their germination. It is important to realize
that many weeds are native to sites where the soil is constantly
disturbed, and by regularly hoeing, you give them great
encouragement.

You clearly want to hoe rather deeply so as to clean some depth
of soil, not just the immediate surface.

This method also gives unrepentant perennial weeds (couch grass,
for example) a chance to reveal themselves. If any turn up, you
can nuke them either by hand or using Roundup. My own preference
would be to carefully fork up any couch grass roots as the
process will provide yet further disturbance of the soil.

The long delay between initial tillage and final seeding also
gives the soil a chance to settle, so you can correct any bumps
or dips during the summer and get a smoother lawn than you might
otherwise.

This may sound like a lot of work, and the long delay while you
face an area of bare earth may sound unappealing, but as in so
many aspects of gardening, the secret to long-term success lies
in careful preparation.


--
Rodger Whitlock
Victoria, British Columbia, Canada
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