Repairing garden after drainage work

NIMAN

Looking for some advice on this. Apologies for long post!

Had a large section of the back garden ruined a couple of weeks ago due to necessary drainage work.

The area affected is approx 10 metres x 9 metres.

It was very wet at the time and got the guy doing the work to flatten down the aftermath as best he could. Since then it hasn't really rained much and the soil is now compacted and baked dry.

Option 1 I was going to go for was to rotovate it all, remove stones and take it as level as I could before seeding it. But with the lockdown I would struggle to get the equipment hired.

Option 2 was just to buy a load of top soil and throw it on top of the current mess, level it off and re-seed it. There is also a natural dip now after the work and this would allow me to try to level it better with the addition of more soil to work with.

I have included work photos taken today, with the extended dry spell drying it out even more.

Any advice or thoughts appreciated.

https://flic.kr/s/aHsmMBhMNj

looksee

I have a similar situation, in my case a 'track' about 60m x 2m. At the moment it is like concrete. Its due to rain on sunday so I am hoping next week to rake out the rough bits and re-seed, but it actually suits me to have a path left in the centre bare bit so I will put some bark mulch on it in due course and just seed the edges. In your case if you can get top soil I reckon that would be the easiest solution. A bit of rough digging to open up the compressed soil and rake it level, then dress with top soil. Don't worry too much about stones, so long as they are not big ones that could damage a mower they don't matter, and actually small stones help improve the soil.

aw

Had similar after drainage work a couple of years back.

Manually broke up that hard pan with a garden fork, thankfully the soil was decent. I got a load of well rotted horse manure and spread it, mixed in some sand too.
Mixed that all together, raked it and seeded.
Doing well now.

The main thing you need to do as mentioned above is to ensure that hard pan or crust is broken up. Then you can spread soil over it and seed it.

You won't feel going over that with a fork. Coupls of hours will see it done. No need for a rotovator.

NIMAN

How much sand would I need to add for that area?


Might pass on the well rotted horse manure though!

Lumen

I would not bother trying to manually fix that soil other than breaking the surface up a bit. Roots are the best way to break up soil, they do it at a microscopic level.

I'd just level it with some fresh topsoil, reseed it, and let nature take its course.