How to get rid of weeds in a gravel drive?

[thenewaveragebear1983]

Our drive is awful, and massive. We measured today and it’s 22m x 18m!

it’s very very weedy where the cars don’t park. It has currently got a Cotswold stone gravel all over, very shallow in places, no membrane, just sat on very hard, compacted ‘ground’ (our local soil is heavy clay so a combination of that and the stone) . It won’t have been done properly before we bought the house. it’s not been cared for particularly well since we bought it either tbh.

we are prepared to graft. We are going to buy 30x bulk bags of stone. please Help me plan what I need to do before my stone gets delivered! i think we need to use a shovel and scrape away the stone,section by section, scrape out the weeds, use some sort of weed killer, replace the old stone, then replenish the whole drive with the new stone.

dh thinks we need to pull up the weeds, spray with roundup, stick a load of new stone on top and job done.

any experience if this and success stories?

Instead of buying 30 ton bags, call up a quarry or aggregate supplier and get a lorry load delivered and tipped on to the drive. Will cost £60/ton instead of £100+/ton.

Proper way to do it is pull everything up, put down the weed membrane, put down hardcore, compact it with a whacker plate then rake the gravel on top. It's much easier with a digger moving the gravel but can be done with a barrow.

We've just finished ours this morning, used Cotswold chippings too and it's looking great. Good luck!

Oh and even if you do use a weed membrane, you will still get weeds as they'll seed on top in the gravel, but they're easy enough to pull out.

If you don't mind using it a glyphosphate based weedkiller will do the trick. I have a similar area of gravel and zap it a couple of times a year then keep on top of it by weeding in between. Re gravel, I got 14 tons delivered loose in 2 lorry loads of 7 tons and the lorry dribbled it along the drive and I just had to level it. Much easier and cheaper than dumpy bags. That was 10 years ago and needs raking but doesn't need topping up again yet.

thanks for all your replies

we aren’t removing our old layer of gravel, and we’re not going to use a membrane, but I did wonder about hiring a whacker plate to compress our old gravel layer firm.

dh has had a quote for loose vs bags and it’s 1/4 cheaper to go loose, so that’s what we’re having.

I will definitely look for the electric weed burner as well, thanks for the tip!

sod that... I'm interested in one of those weed burner things

This is the weed burner in Lidl from today-I’ve had mine for a couple of years

https://www.lidl.co.uk/c/garden-event/a10045667

@Jeezitneverends I went to Lidl to get one today! Bargain £19.99!

Membranes need to be put under the sub base and not between the finished surface and sub base. Being as there doesn't appear to be a sub base it would be pointless as the membrane will start to come through the stone.

@Cheslea2010 yes we have no proper sub base, it’s just compacted ground/mud/clay soil I think. With poor drainage. We wouldn’t be putting a membrane down. There’s mixed reviewed about the efficacy and it makes it an expensive job. The driveway is huge!

A sub base is crushed stone such as MOT Type 1. Compacted ground isn't a sub base.

I know, as I said- we have no sub base, just compacted ground