wild field to lovely lawn

roisinrad

I'd like some advice pls or maybe someone can give me a link to a relevant thread here... built a house in 2010, now need to tackle the garden.
the site is 1 acre it was used to graze cattle it's very uneven, the soil is clay with v poor drainage, the grass is tough skutch grass, there are a few sycamore trees. I want to put in a post and rail fence along the road boundary, with new native hedge get rid of the existing grass and weeds and sow a new lawn. what do I do first, can I use roundup at this time of year, when the grass and weeds die do I get a farmer with tractor to scrape the site and level it. thank you

gaelicyoda

Whoa! It's all sounding eerily familiar...

Myself and the missus were in the very same situation and we got it mostly sorted by the end of last "summer" (if you could call it that).
Cattle were in the lawn too before we bought the house, so I imagine the lawns would look somewhat similar.

What we did was a little bit all of the above.
One of our neighbours had a cutter attachment for his tractor and kindly agreed to give the first cut to the hip-high grass.
That was grand, but we left it go again a little while until we finally bit the bullet and got a local landscaper in to cut it for us.
He had to do 3 progressively shorter cuts on his sit-on lawnmower - one after the other - to get it to a fairly short height.

We had guys in to look at turning the soil and everything, but this fella advised us not to go down that route (and to be fair, we were not too keen to spend the €1900 we were quoted!!) so we said we'd give him some leeway and see how it turned out - not much to lose, right?
He came back to cut it every two weeks or so, and after about 3 or 4 more cuts, the green was really coming back to the grass, and it was losing that dried-out look and yellow colour.

So my advice for what it's worth (and by the way, I don't consider myself green-fingered at all) is to call a landscaper in and consult with them on it. It cost us €40 a cut, but the €120-€160 or whatever it was we paid was a lot cheaper than the alternative, and the lawn looks great now.

Mind you, he also advised us to rent one of those small steamroller things to go over the grass while it was soft to get out some of the divots from the hoof marks, but we (and by that I me 'I') never really bothered my arse because I don't have a trailor to get one, so they're still there... but we don't go on it much, and you'd never really tell to look at it.

roisinrad

thanks for that but now I'm a bit confused maybe I just need to cut it back but then that doesn't take care of the weeds and thistles .....

gaelicyoda

roisinrad wrote: »

... but then that doesn't take care of the weeds and thistles .....

Oh yeah, I forgot that part actually - we had some roundup sprayed along the edges of the lawn to get rid of those, and there was also another patch where all the thistles, etc. were growing that was also sprayed. Maybe we were just lucky, but the rest of the lawn was relatively weed free for the most part, so not that big a concern for us. But your own situation might be different ...

gaelicyoda

Hey - came across some old invoices this morning, so yet one other thing I forgot to mention was the fertilizer (sorry about this... but it was a little while ago!).

We got 2 x 50kg bags of 7-6-17 "potash" fertilizer, which yer man spread for us once the grass got a couple of cuts

monkeynuz

gaelicyoda wrote: »

Oh yeah, I forgot that part actually - we had some roundup sprayed along the edges of the lawn to get rid of those, and there was also another patch where all the thistles, etc. were growing that was also sprayed. Maybe we were just lucky, but the rest of the lawn was relatively weed free for the most part, so not that big a concern for us. But your own situation might be different ...

Just bear in mind that roundup will kill everything green that it touches. Might be worth looking at a selective herbicide such as verdone which won't kill the grass.

Hope this helps.

M.