by Ethel Smith

Created on: November 24, 2007

Having finally got a garden I must admit that I love it, but do moan about the maintenance at times. Our back garden had a small lawn, when we moved in about eight years ago, but we removed it about three years ago. The problem was that it just did not get enough sun and light in the winter to prevent it becoming a swamp. We tried all the usual tricks to improve the drainage and the quality of the lawn but, with the advent of our little rescue dog, we gave up. Inevitably the patches where he would urinate, at times, just died a death and would never recover despite trying to re-seed amongst other things.

When we looked at removing the lawn from this part of our garden we considered a couple of alternatives. We still wanted to encourage the wealth of wildlife that visits our City garden throughout the year. We have blackbirds throughout the winter, frogs that come to breed in our pond in spring, masses of butterflies and bees during summer and a variety of other small birds and insects all year. We also had to consider costs, as money was tight, and the amount of work that would be needed as Hubby and I are no spring chickens.

In the end we decided to purchase a smallish sized pea gravel which would be ok for the dogs, frogs and us, and replace our lawn. In the Spring we began the task of removing the lawn and a couple of overgrown pine trees which were far too near the house for comfort and much too big for the garden. We removed the lawn with sheer hard work. Both Hubby and I used a spade to dig down about 4-6 inches and remove a patch of grass at a time. We piled these clods of earth onto a compost pile in the garden for use later, when well rotted down. Once removed we turned the earth over by digging and breaking it up with spades. We then walked up and down the soil, a row at a time, doing a sort of shuffle. This smoothed the surface and eventually we had a nice flat surface. You need to check this with a spirit level because, as with most D.I.Y work, preparation is everything.

When we were satisfied that the earth was flat, plus stone and rock free, and well packed down we began to lay a liner. We had bought one that was a little more expensive as it had a 10 year guarantee and we did not want to have to do all the hard work again. We laid this a row at a time. Each row needs to slightly overlap the other and we weighted the edges down, from time to time, with large rocks. Once we were satisfied with the results we lifted all the bags of pea gravel onto

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