Land overgrown with grass

[HotWaterBottleAndABook]

I haven’t really done much in the garden since we moved other that prune/ try to sort the lawn. The whole garden was massively overgrown and neglected.

How do I sort grass that has grown long/ straggly and weedy over everything. It’s not grass area - more like rockeries/ hilly areas. Strimming didn’t cut it last year and I can't imagine having to pull everything out by hand.

Am I kidding myself that there might be another way?

Pull it/fork it out. There are no magic solutions.

Depends what you want to do with it. The no dig method (putting down barrier layers over grass) should in theory work on anything but it depends if you want to layer up the ground. I've done a bit of no dig but only for beds where I want to plant up something new! If you search Charles Dowding and no dig you should get an idea of how it works.

Not the best photos at all, but gives you the idea. This is the almost untouched wild section. It’s not flat, but rocky/ on a slope.

I want it to be wildlife friendly, but not awful messy wild. I would like it to be manageable in the long term and not high maintenance (if that is possible)

I want to do as much as I can before it all starts growing again!

Are you sure 😅

I'm not sure what to plant in its stead. Or whether to keep it as tamer grass.

Strim it again and again and again, a few weeks inbetween, then get a petrol mower and mow it bi weekly. There's no quid fix, you either do this or you dig it up and re turf it.

We had a garden full of nettles when we moved into our house, some almost as tall as me, this is what we did, last year we had grass that was lovely and normal without having to reseed or returf it

Can you see the photos? They were there, now they seem to have disappeared!

Trying away with photos.

*again

*again

Good grief . Posting with photos is a nightmare!

I underestimated the "massive" in "massively overgrown".

Get someone in with a digger. Scrape it off and start again.

Oh I’m so envious ! Love a project ! If you want to get back to bare earth, you can chuck an old carpet over and leave it for months and months - def easiest. But you’ll still need to fork it over after …

😬😬😬

Having had to dig out a carpet someone used to try this, I recommend against it. Carpet is worse than weeds to remove, particularly if it's cheap carpet that semi-rots. If you want the time rather-than-effort approach, a triple/quadruple layer of cardboard and 6" of cheap mulch (bark, compost) will work on most grasses and weeds (but not bindweed, ground elder, or mares tail).

Oh, that looks so interesting! You have a nice young birch sapling in there, and a lovely little pine. The almost dead bush looks like a tamarisk (but that may be the photo). And a chunk of rock which could be made a feature.

I get the impression that a lot of the taller dead stems are rosebay willowherb - they look too stout for grass.

continue to strim, then take a small area to dig out grass, rosebay etc. Start a compost heap, then in a year you’ll be able to start mulching. Don’t try to do everything at once. Better to have a small bit looking good than a whole garden a quarter done.

Cardboard, thick layers of cardboard, peg it down - if you put compost or soil improver under it that will help. Then plant into it. you'll still have to do some digging out round the plants and weeding but it'll cut down. Is there anything nice in there that you want to keep?

I’ve done no dig over grass and it’s worked a treat. Thick cardboard cut round any shrubs you want to keep, dampen it and loads of manure / soil.
i think you may need something more substantial on that though E.g digger suggestion.
that all said if your going wild flower you might get away with it. don’t forget you can get wildflower turf which is a good way of an immediate result.

Have you been there long enough to know what’s worth saving and what’s worth getting rid?

Most of the area is so overgrown that even the nicer plants are not good (for example, honeysuckle that is almost all woody).

The trees were growing into each other - I’ve tried to cut back everything into it’s place.

I'm not a gardener, but I want to learn more… Here’s some photos from last summer taken from a different area - it’s all just a mangle of trees and leaves - hard to tee, anything apart form the other. They’re not great photos because I wasn’t trying to photo that area, I just happened to get it and have cropped it down to take my children out of the photo. The plant at the from right-ish is not part of this area - it's an optical illusion that makes it look like it’s the same area.

Some areas of the ground are covered in plastic as if someone has tried to kill off old weeds, but that got covered and had grown over….

The whole area hasn’t been touched for a very long time.

It’s so overgrown that you can hardly see the fir/ birch. I cut the tangle of trees back to let the other trees breathe a little. Not sure whether I should cut back even more, but I don’t want to kill things for the sake of it - just tame them, really.

From a Google image search, could there be some silky dogwood?

Wow! How do you know all this?

Wow! How do you know all this? You can’t garden for 60 years without somthing rubbing off

^when I say 'taken from a different area', I mean it’s of the same area, but photographed from a different angle.

Excellent!