Am I insane to think I can lay my own lawn?

[Merryoldgoat]

I am not an experienced gardener but now I have a family I’d really like a useable garden rather than the wasteland it currently is.

My lawn is a disaster - uneven, weedy and patchy - it needs replacing.

I’ve looked at videos, and I think I understand what I need to do and I’d hire the necessary equipment but am I mad to consider it?

Any pitfalls to be aware of? Advice from an old hand? Much appreciate any input.

No, not insane at all. I've done it a couple of times. It is hard work but not that difficult.

The main thing is to prepare and level the ground first & just take your time to lay each piece properly and do the aftercare - mainly lots of watering.

Try and get it delivered the day you're laying it, or the day before if necessary, but don't let it dry out. It's easier to do it in the cooler weather, so if possible I'd wait until autumn, but it can be done in summer if you're prepared to do a lot of extra watering.

You can put down seed we did that. Think it's easier than turfing

its absolutely doable in theory, but how big is the lawn and do you have the time to dedicate to doing it? It might be a job well worth paying someone else to do.

It's all in the prep, get that right and you'll be grand!

I did half of ours. The difficult bit is the levelling imo.

Are you quite fit and strong? Damp turf rolls are really heavy.

DH and i did ours, it's not that big and it was hard work humping all the rolls about. I don't think i could do it on my own

My other top tip - don’t transport turf like this. 🤦‍♀️

Re turf vs seed - one of our neighbours recently redid his lawn, he'd had a big shrubby bed taken out and the rest had got too weedy for his liking. He balked at the price of turf so seeded it - he did a lot of watering for a couple of weeks; less than a month in its looking really good, much better than turf would have.

This may only work well if you can water the whole area and manage the rest of your garden without walking on the new lawn till it's well established, I suppose.

Obviously good prep is essential before seeding too.

I've done both, I've had an area turfed, and it worked well. You need to keep it watered with the sprinkler and also I did another area and seeded, and it has also grown well.

Overall turf pretty much gives you instant thick grass, seed takes way way longer, is not thick and luscious for a while, but is clearly much cheaper. The hard work is preparing the ground and we had friends round to help us. We could have done it ourselves but it would have been very, very hard work.

Prepare well and water water water ....

Thank you all kindly for your advice.

It will be me, husband and some strong friends, I plan to hire a sod cutter and rotovator to assist.

This is intended for mid/late autumn as we have kids so there’s zero chance the garden will be undisturbed if we did it now.

I think that we should remove the current terrible turf with the sod cutter and take our time preparing the ground as you say, ensuring we get rid of the weeds and big stones. Then level and prepare it.

Our garden is about 30m long but it’s a funny shape so we’re just doing the front half which is kind of triangular so prob about 75msq.

I’ll definitely make sure we plan it properly.

I’d love to pay someone to do it but I just don’t have the money and I really would like a usable garden by next year.

Seed over turf any day of the week.

Autumn is a good time for grass seeding.

We’ve just had turf laid in an area of about 6 metres x 5 metres. It took two men working about 7 hour s a day two days to prep the area, but maybe 3 hours or so to lay the turf. Prep involved digging up the existing grass, levelling (the largest time), putting down weed killer, laying a membrane. The greatest amount of time spent has been watering it. Buy a sprinkler that arcs is my advice! Turf needs masses of water. I started a thread about two weeks ago to get advice about how much time to spend watering and was told that I wouldn’t over water my London garden in May so not to worry about too much watering, but also that twice daily watering with a sprinkler for maybe three hours given the area i had was to be expected as we hadn’t had a drop of rain.

My dp levelled and re seeded mine. We've got 100 ft long garden! He's a builder though so used to hard physical work and does things properly. He didn't do it all st once though. He did it in sections. Started a couple of years ago and the main garden looks lovely now. He's now working on the top section that's Separated with a fence and an open 'gate'. I know he used sand and compost to level it. A lot of raking and wedding. Plus sprinkler every day when it was first sown. Turf is more instant but more expensive. Too much for the size of our garden.