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First lawn, first post. In need of advice....
On May 1, 4:55*pm, TeaBag wrote:
Hello all. We have recently had a house built and so the "garden" is just soil and boulders at the moment. We're planning on getting a lawn down at the end of the summer. We're complete garden newbies as we've always lived in flats (apart from renting a house previously where we did mow the lawn). Now we have the chance to start a lawn from scratch and so would like some advice from people who know, like yourselves. Some information: Location - 30 miles west of Aberdeen Soil - quite a clay soil with lots of fist sized stones Area - about 600 sq. metres (although we'll only be laying a lawn on about 200 sq. m of it to start with) I have a plan but please advise on how good/bad you may think it is: Step 1: Spray all weeds/ground with glyphosate As Bob said, no need to spray bare ground. If you miss some tiny weeds, you can go back and get them in the second pass. Step 2: Spray all weeds/ground with glyphosate again two weeks later Just spray what's still alive. Also, when you buy the glyphosate look for the concentrated products, like 48%. It's a lot more cost effective. I'd mix it to about 5%. Step 3: Once all weeds are dead, rotorvate ground (to make levelling easier) I'd probably mow it first. And if there is a lot of weed debris, maybe rake out most of it before tilling. Also, how out of level is it? If there are just some areas that need to be graded, do you really need to churn up the whole thing? Step 4: Level and de-stone soil (and possibly add top-soil if needed) Step 5 (if time permits): Spray any new emerging weeds with glyphosate Step 6: Remove/dig in dead weeds I'd forget about that. After all of the above, there shouldn't be anything worth worrying about. Step 7: Trample/firm soil That probably means roll lightly. Step 8: Lay turf Are there any flaws or perhaps better ways to establish a new lawn? The other alternative is to seed. It's funny. I live here in NJ, and I seeded my lawn years ago. Right now it's nice and green, actively growing. A friend bought a $1mil house in a sub-division of recently built houses. The builder used sod. His lawn is barely growing, doesn't look anywhere as good as mine. It didn't look as good over winter either. Mine stayed a lot greener for more of the winter. We both apply similar amounts of fertilizer etc. So, clearly it's the variety of grass that's the difference. You would think that spring green-up, winter color, etc would be important to a sod supplier, but I guess not.... If you buy the seed yourself, you can choose the exact grass you want. There are online references that show test results for different grasses, rating color, texture, disease resistance, spring green-up, etc. My point is that for all the work and expense you're going to go through, I'd spend some time researching the sod or seed you're going to use. Getting a real nice grass may not cost anymore than a crappy one and even if it does, it's not much more. Also, I was looking at getting a wide-toothed rake such as the Chelwood 18E or 18K for raking up the stones as these rakes have a 4cm gap between the teeth. Would you recommend any other or would one of these do the job well? No experience with those UK rakes. Apologies for all the questions, but I really am new to this (plenty more questions to come on growing veggies etc. but first things first!) Thanks in advance for any advice you could possibly give. -- TeaBag With veggies, first thing is to find out what animals there are that will eat them. Around here, NJ, the deer are so bad that without a fence it's hopeless. |
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