Aeration for new lawn

bauney

Hello boardsies, i extended my lawn last year and that part is horribly wet and spongy. I may not have gotten enough of good quality soil when I was prepay the area. I used alot of the existing soil which was very poor quality, dauby, compact. Currently the grass there very green with poor grass and weeds and it looks fine from afar but its a mess when u walk on it. Then soil is saturated and the water is unable to soak through. The soil is poor quality and heavily compacted in that the water cannot penetrate well at all. And yes i put in loads of pipes and drainage stone. The area size is approx 30x20meters and its fairly flat with a gentle slopes outwards towards a newly built stone wall foundation.

Has anyone experienced this and fixed it?

Is there any tool/machine that be used to aerate the soil? I know you can get spiking machines used for sport pitches. Obviously I would only be get to get to do work on it later in the spring when the weather improves

Lumen

Garden fork.

looksee

You can either fight with this for years, or deal with it now and save a lot of aggravation. First, don't walk on it. Second, the ground is saturated anyway, even on free draining soil it is soggy. However, punching drainage holes into solid clay is not going to create drainage, just lots of tiny swimming pools, unless you can be sure you have pierced through to more draining soil.

You could give it lots of top dressing of a peat (or similar) type compost that will eventually improve the soil, but honestly you would be better to wait till the weather has dried up/warmed up a bit, dig over the top (impervious) layer, add a lot of fibrous/organic material and re-seed. Adding grit or sharp sand is another option but I don't know much about it, I think it is a bit of a job for an expert to get it right.

bauney

Thanks for that advice guys. I already spent 3 efforts (over the past 7 years) of making that area in front of the house nice and neat.
It was first a square patch of field for sheep in front of the house. this was leveled and reseeded at the time by myself and my father with very primitive tools and limited experience. The soil that was used here extremely poor quality but it was thought it would do the job.
5 years back when doing some fencing around we put down some more drainage pipes and stones in that area. this was done by myself and experienced digger person. Again i thought this would do the job. Little improvement here.
Last year we went at it again when building a stone wall at the front. This time we extended the replaced the field with our lawn (by extended our lawn). Some more drainage and pipes by myself any another experienced digger man and which he scrawed and loosened the topsoil after having it sprayed 2 weeks previous. Then a landscaper guy came in and power harrowed it and seeded it last summer. i thought that would be it by now but no. Still as bad as ever.

Only a couple weeks after it was seeded (in august) there was horrendous amount of rainfall over couple of days. I mean huge downpours. From that day on, the area was noticeably wet, soggy, damp. It never really fully dried out. This was obvious even back in September (even after our massive dry and hot summer).

The lawn area is not sheltered by any means but i am at odds at to how to fix this. I am hoping that over time that if the grass quality picks up and better root structure that it might help drain it better and that maybe by getting a machine to add spike and sand to it can help my situation. This can only occur if it dries up enough :-(

I guess i learnt a valuable lesson here, get the proper experienced peopled involved from the start and don't scrimp on good quality soil. If only i had read this post 7 years ago.