Our customer was pretty specific about what they wanted in their new garden.
The specification was to create a clean looking low maintenance garden with a small lawn area and an space to sit and relax on the long summer evenings.
The overall design was given to us and with a few suggestions we agreed the way forwards.
We needed to do lots of clearing out before we could start. Taking away all the old decking, old turf, unwanted trees and shrubs.
The garden was a typical ‘new build’ type where soil was very poor, heavy with clay and the odd brick or lump of concrete. The property had seen lawn after lawn over the years, because the poor quality solid and bad drainage just wouldn’t support good strong growth.
We overcame the gardens problems by bringing in several tons of quality top soil. After rotovating the area several times, we brought the levels up by almost a foot. The additional depth and improved quality of soil will aid drainage and improve the new lawns chances.
Although it’s hard to tell from the photographs we have, the garden was on all sorts of uneven slops, falling by around two foot from the highest point to the lowest point. The additional solid and careful grading helped bring the garden back to a usable slight incline, one of the most noticeable points to please the customer who couldn’t believe just how level we got the garden.
We chose an area in the North-West corner of the garden to locate the seating area.
This is the warmest and most sheltered part of the garden throughout the day receiving the most hours of sunshine and good shelter. This corner of the garden is also the most private part of the plot.
As requested we used new, treated railway sleepers to form the structure of the garden. In the seating area, we first laid a layer of hardcore and packed it down using a whacker plate to create a hard base topped off with a flint gravel. The reason for the two layers and compacting would allow for a hard patio to be laid at any time in the future.
Following the lines of the old garden, we once again used the railway sleepers to form the raised gravelled beds.
After filling them with good quality soil we laid a weed barrier membrane before adding the decorative flint gravel.
The raised beds help to improve drainage and keep maintenance to a minimum. Eventually more Bamboo will added to form a backdrop with featured low maintenance plants added to fill the bed.
Before we could lay the lawn as we mentioned before we had to lift both the quality and physical levels of the soil.
We can’t stress enough the need for good preparation when it comes to laying new turf. Overall, we brought in over four tons of rich black organic soil which was rotovated into the existing soil.
The soil was levelled and trod down, prior to the turf being laid we applied a specific pre-lay granular fertiliser to help the roots establish.
