Please HELP! What to do with our garden - barky bits/lawn queries!?!

[leeloo1]

I'm hoping some experienced gardeners will be able to help me out with some fab ideas!

We've lived in our house for a couple of years without doing anything to the smallish garden, but now we have Ed (22 weeks) its just not child friendly enough to imagine him playing out there, but I don't know enough about gardens to really know what to do with it. Oh and the added pressure is that I want to become a childminder rather than go back to work, but the garden would definitely not impress Ofsted!

I'm in the middle of digging out the small pond (eeeeek - harder work than I thought!), but the rest of the garden is filled with paving squares with quite sharp shingly stuff between them. There's thick black plastic underneath all that and slightly raised borders round the outside.

So - how to make this child friendly - and low maintenance?!?

My feeling was to get rid of all the paving squares and shingle (helpfully this can only be taken out through the house as we don't have any side/back access to the garden) and to chuck grass seed down. My parents reckon the soil under the plastic will be horrid and sour though so the grass will die. So, the alternative is to put that barky stuff down, but would it look really odd to have a barky garden?!?

Any help or ideas would be greatly appreciated as i'm at a loss to know what to do for the best.

Lisa x

[purepurple]

I always take the path of least resistance. Work with what you have got and don't make extra work for yourself. Grass will need cutting and regular looking after.
Have you considered keeping the slabs and putting the bark down on top? You will need loads though!

If you take up the slabs you can put topsoil and turf down, that's what DH did with large borders of bark to cut down on the weeding!

BTW lots of children's nurserys and playgroups only have paving slabs and manage ok.

Good luck with whatever you choose

[moshie]

Paving is great for kids' ride on toys, and can be used all year round, unlike a lawn. Also good for putting a playhouse on without having to prepare a base.
Could you just put bark on the area the pond is in now to make a soft surface under a slide and keep the rest paved?

I'm a childminder and have found that the patio is more useful than the lawn, which can only be used April - September really. Oh, and babies eat bark and toddlers throw it.

[leeloo1]

Hey, thanks for the posts and ideas... although I'm now officially more confused than ever, as had lunch with other mums after posting here and they said definitely get rid of paving/gravel stuff and put down lawn... weep

I do really like the idea of a low maintenance garden (and path of least resistance is also a favourite), which is pretty much why I've ignored the garden since we moved in as I just didn't know what to do with it...

I think the key problem with the paving is that its a bit uneven and interspersed with gravelly/shingley/slatey stuff, so little people could easily trip on them and cut baby knees (or concuss baby heads - eeeeep!), which is why I thought of the bark... but I definitely don't want LOs to be eating/throwing it!

Maybe if I shuffled all the paving to one end, next to the concrete-y bit by the house, so ride on bikes could go there, get rid of gravelly stuff altogether, then put grass at the end away from the house where the pond is and in the space left where the paving bits have shuffled up???

Or... the paving could all go at the far end of the garden underneath where the garden seat thingy is and the rest of it could be lawn?