No dig garden - stuck on what I do next

[BlowDryRat]

I've finally gotten round to clearing my overgrown front garden and covering it with jute/biodegradable mulch matting. I'm just stuck on how I proceed from here.

I'm planning to have a creeping thyme, heather and camomile lawn covering most of it, with a flowerbed at the back with mixed perennials and hardy shrubs like lavender. The flowerbed is sectioned off so I can just cover the matting with topsoil and plant directly, but the lawn area is puzzling me. Do I cover the matting with topsoil and another layer of matting, then plant into that layer?

I am a bit lost on what you are trying to do, but as a general rule when attempting no dig you:

• place an easily biograded first layer that will block all weeds and light. Typically this is a good layer of brown cardboard, which will totally rot away in 6-12 months and will block all light while it does so. I think you might be using the jute matting in place of this?
• Then you add 10-20cm of organic material on top. Top soil, compost, manure - or a mix of them. This provides two things. 1. It provides a shallow bed to plant in immediately things that will not want to put down deep roots too soon (or things with extra strong deep roots that cardboard will not deter). 2. It encourages worms up to start to move the top layer of nutrients further down into the soil (especially once the cardboard has degraded) so you don't have to dig to do so. For flower borders I would use more than 'just' top soil and would take the chance to mix it in with plenty of rotted manure, or similar. Or simply layer it in if you won't want to mix. eg 5cm of rotted manure on top of the matting and then 10cm of top soil on top of that.

In terms on the lawn, most weeds are controlled by regular mowing because they cannot cope with that. Some that do cope with mowing (eg clover and daisies) you may not see as a weed at all - I don't! So I, personally, wouldn't bother with matting at all on the lawn area and would use the mower plus a bit of overseeding to get it back under control.

However, if you want a new, pristine lawn and want to use the matting, I think you'd put one layer down, top with top soil (don't bother adding compost or manure for lawns) and seed or turf over that. If you want to do the thing properly, the top soil should ideally be of a slightly sandy consistency, so I would be tempted to add about 25-35% of sand mixed into the top soil. Unless the top soil is already specifically for lawns.

Hope that helps!

Thankyou! There won't be any grass, just thyme and camomile to make a "lawn".

The layers make sense. I've just spent a shocking amount of money on compost, manure, straw and top soil. DH is sore because apparently he liked the garden the way it was (so did the bees, but we couldn't use the garden path, it was so overgrown). I'd better not make a mess of it 😬