Our garden is a fairly typical town one - long and fairly narrow, luckily it faces south and there are a couple of tallish trees at the far end. The half near the house is ok, but the end section, which is about 5m wide and probably about 15m long, is full of nettles, matted ivy and brambles. We've managed to keep it nearly under control with mowing, but there's no way we can dig down to plant anything. It's also an odd shape - there's a path of slabs down the centre which is about 8" lower than the sides, and during the recent rain it actually flooded to about 6" deep... Neighbours on either side have put raised beds in, but what we'd like to do is a wildflower meadow for the DDs to play in.
So, the guidelines say you need the soil to be not very fertile. I'm assuming since the weeds grow so vigorously that it probably is quite fertile! We were thinking about just getting the top 6" or so dug away by a man with a digger, since we've found it very hard to dig past the ivy matting and the bramble roots. Would this then be ok for sowing wildflower seeds in the autumn? Would it be likely to flood again, or would putting down seeds help to stop this? It's certainly not what I'd call anything approaching a lawn!