Rotavate or not....

Anatom

slowburner wrote: »

I think you might need 141 m2, based on your schematic above.
You have two rectangles - one at 14 x 50' (65 m2) and one at 32 x 30' (90 m2)
that's 155 m2 overall

Then subtract the patio (10' x 10'?) and the shed (8' x 6'?) at around 14m2

155-14 = 141 m2

Better off to have slightly too much than slightly too little - sods make a great compost.

I agree - better to order 145m2 to be safe (you can always use the left-overs to re-patch any wornout areas in your front garden.

Use €3.50 as a guide price per sq metre (Leinster Lawns quote from their website), although this may come down as you order more, so it should be no more than about €507 or so...

sponge_bob

any updates?
did you get your sods sorted?

pleuraXeraphim

Hey, Well I am still digging would you believe

There has been a few days of heavy rain here over the past week and each time I have had to abandon the digging as it gets very mucky out there. However it has given me a good opportunity to see how well the drains are
working. The main soiak pit working great. No water in that rea at all.

I decided on digging down all the drains over a foot. I also dug down a second Soak Pit. However as it was an extra pit i decided to only make it about 1 and a 1/2 feet wide (1 Metre deep). During the rain the pit (without the stones in it) fills up over half way. It takes about 24 hours to drain. I decided last night that I would now make it a wider pit (extra foot wide) so that it will have a bigger capacity. You can see the drain in Image 1 below.
Image 1


To the left of the patio in Image 2 - You can see how the foot deep trench was filling up. That water has no escape route currently except down asI have dammed up the exit point temporarily. That water sitting in the drain was taking a few days to drain off fully and it was quite slow. So I decided last night to start digging my third soak pit in the middle of that drain. I got down about 2 feet and about 2 feet wide. This morning the drains were empty and the pit had filled about half way.

Image 2


This weekend I hope to finish off those pits once and for all. And dig the remainder of the trenches to a depth of 12 inches. Once thats done I can finally start laying pipes Then I gotta start on the rest of the work.

I plan on using Irish Organic Weedkiller to kill of the weeds and the grass and then to start digging with a fork to loosen and break up the soil.

slowburner

Be the hokey, it looks like the Somme! Fair play to you for sticking at it - it looks like nasty work - sticky mud, ugh!

sponge_bob

yeah, it looks like a daunting task for sure so well done for sticking with it. i know if it were me the garden would be full of half dug holes and drains for the the next 12mths or so:D

Anatom

pleuraXeraphim - You're getting there, well done! That's a serious amount of work you've done there.

It will look bad right up until the point where its almost completely finished (if that makes any sense at all!!), but the result will be a dry back garden! The best part will be when you can sit on that patio with a glass of whatever and just gaze around you at all the work you've put into it.

Although it mightn't appear so at the moment, its a very satisfying exercise, so stick with it! You'll be fitter by the end of it too!:D

slowburner

I sure hope you get the weather to sit back and enjoy all your hard work!

eddie81

How did the French drains work out in the end?

pleuraXeraphim

UPDATE - Finally an update more than a year on. Thought it would be good to post up what happened with this project and maybe some one might get some tips on what not to do when taking on something like this. I kept on taking many photos of my progress along the way and had planned on updating this thread but then it felt like I would never actually finish the project.

As I went into winter last year the weather became so bad I had to abandon for a few months and the garden was left like this for most of the winter. It was depressing to look out at and my Wife was less than impressed :-)



Having put down all the drains I was then left with the hard task of addressing the rest of the garden and to either hand dig or rotovate. There was piles of earth left all around the garden. I had to clear all this into one big pile which ended up being about 5-6 tonnes.



Drains covered in and earth mounds cleared away into one corner of the garden.



I then began to hand dig section by section the garden. This was the stone pile I was dug out for one small section of the garden. I would like to have dug down deeper but was only going down about 7-8 inches.



Gradually getting the place dug and finding wine bottles and the odd big boulder along the way.



At this stage I still only had one half of the garden dug and the dirt pile was getting larger and larger over in the far side of the garden. So I was wondering If I would ever get the project finished. The effort at this stage was back breaking and it really felt like a mountain to climb.



I decided at this stage to get some helping hand and I hired a guy to come in and help finish the job. He came in and filtered the dirt pile and filled in the holes and got rid of the stone. He hired in a rotovator and went and rotovated the section of the garden that I had already hand dug which gave a nice finish. However the parts of the garden that had not been hand dug he just covered with top soil and did not rotovate. Lesson being you must really keep on top of these guys and watch their every move or else do the job yourself.



Having said that he did a great job in finishing things off and it was nice and level and seeded and flat nearly a year after the project had started.



BEFORE

So here was the garden before the project began.
It was a very poor quality stony patch surface....



With very bad drainage in sections....



Marshy and poor quality grass.



After

Due to costs I ended up having to go with grass seed instead of getting Rolled Turf. It was planted back in the end of February and it was painfully slow to grow. There was no warmth at all for along time and it took nearly two months before any sort of growth took shape. However it kicked in then around the start of June. I then took a risk and went and put down 'EverGreen' fertilizer and one bag of patch magic for the small patches and I ended up with a meadow of grass which has been impossible to keep cut the past 12 weeks :-)



View from the other side of the garden. Major push now to get that ugly wall covered with climbers asap.



I will add a summary post shortly on what I would do different if I were to do this project again and what to watch out for.....

redser7

Fair play to you. Is that a little bit of water gathering there?