Please help! We had a patio put into our new build garden last summer - our garden slopes away from the house slightly, and the end result is that the patio sits a bit higher than the rest of the garden. DH was desperate to get it done (I suggested we wait a bit and get a proper landscaping company who could do some levelling).
The patio itself is great and really well done, but their solution to the sloping garden was to chuck a load of top soil around the sides (over the existing turf), rake it down and tell us to chuck some grass seed on top. I suggested turfing it when i saw that they'd done, but DH insisted that wasn't necessary. They also mixed the topsoil with what they'd dug up out of the garden, which was a stony, gravelly mess.
Almost a year down the line, the grass has grown in but it's terrible quality, patchy and FULL of stones. DH and his FIL insisted on doing the seeding themselves without doing any research, so the soil wasn't compressed or stamped down at all, resulting in a spongy mess that your feet sink into when you step on it. We're now looking at trying to fix it for this summer but wondered if any one had any brainwaves?
You can roughly see where the sloping areas are around the patio in these pics (I've outlined to give a clearer view). If it was just that the grass was patchy it wouldn't be such an issue, but it's uneven, lumpy and absolutely full of stones.
Would you:
A: pick out as many stones as possible, de-weed, find something heavy to roll it with and put down some more seed/topsoil, or:
B: bite the bullet, pull it all up and returf?
Any advice much appreciated (just to add patio was all done while I was away, otherwise I would have told them to let us lift the existing turf before they started and just put it back on one they'd finished)