How to get rid of gravel 'driveway'

[HavenSprings]

Hi all,

I'd really need some knowledge on the matter, please. Just to clarify, I know fairly nothing about this as this is my very first house (always lived in flats before).

I bought this house which came with a gravel 'driveway' - now, it's not really a driveway, as the kerb is raised and we actually have a side driveway to park. It's more a long stretch of grass in front of the house - for most of the others on the street, only our previous owners decided to get rid of that and put some gravel instead.

Only, I think, they didn't do a great job, because there's a lot of grass growing up in chunks between the gravel! I should think that the purpose of putting down gravel is to stop the grass from growing? Again, I don't really know, so please do tell if that's to be expected.

Anyway, as it's quite awful like that and it still takes me a lot of time to manually get rid of the grass, I was thinking about getting rid of the gravel and the plastic cover (?) underneath and let the grass grow freely again.

My question is: to do this, would it be enough to remove all the gravel and the cover? Or is there more work involved? I expect the ground won't be level with our front pathway as they must have dug to put the gravel, so would I need to put more soil? Get someone professional to do it? Am I missing other steps?

Thanks!

Not sure OP, but I think weeds and grass can grow in gravel because mud collects in the cracks and they take root. Gravel doesn't guarantee no weeds for ever. The snag is that you can't sweep it.

It depends whether you want a gravel driveway or not! Taking it up would be a lot of work. You could try spraying weedkiller?

Grass will grow through gravel. If I were you I’d return it to grass or landscape it as a garden. I’d get a digger and a skip and take it up, then some topsoil and returf or landscape. I don’t know if you have a budget for this? You could get the skip and shovel it up manually, harder work though.

Grass grows through gravel unless you lay a membrane under to stop that
So I assume they’ve just thrown gravel down without the correct preparation
If you don’t want it just dig it up and the grass will grow
Get some of these guys to help get rid of it

my dh and other fellows i know have done this, it's not easy work but certainly most men i know have done it.
but it depends on what you ultimately want and your budget as well as access to tools.
some fellows put together a make shift sieve and wash the rocks getting rid of the debris, clearing down to the landscaping tarp and putting the clean washed rocks back in place.
others shovel the rocks into a wheelbarrow, dump the lot into a skip. again clearing or changing the landscaping tarp and getting new rock.
next would be to wheelbarrow dump the rocks pull up the tarp, bring in good soil and plant grass (if doing this i would equally take time to set up an inground irrigation system) which is super easy to do.
you could pay, it's heavy manual labor but not hard.

Thank you all! I didn't really budget for this, as I originally intended to keep the driveway as is as it didn't look too bad during last viewing - then, when we actually moved, it looked like a jungle was starting to develop! I guess previous owners stopped caring.

It's quite a lot of faff to manually remove the weed, so I think I'll just manually dig up the gravel (it's really not a deep layer... as I said, I think they didn't do a very thorough job with this) and try and understand what to do with what's underneath in order to make it normal grass again, as that's where I'm lost 😆

grass is easy; level with a layer of sand for drainage, next comes some nice top soil (which gets packed down and levelled), next comes irrigation lines (i swear it's worthwhile) then comes your choice of sod or seed. sod only needs steady watering (they will tell you the recommended schedule) and seed needs both watering/heat and staying totally off of it.

Or
the easiest way is to just let the grass grow through
Thats what we did

let the grass grow through?? oh my that's a long term recipe for disaster. every time you mow you risk rocks flying through the window, unpleasant to walk on and once the grass rooted way worse to pull up/out.

After you’ve taken the gravel off!
Although we did this on a pathway without removing the gravel and it’s perfect now

But when we wanted to reduce our drive we removed the gravel and let the grass grow through. Perfect

Although worth noting gravel is great for creating air pockets for great drainage beneath grass

Take the gravel off and let the grass grow, it's incredible stuff, it'll grow back anywhere.

Thank you so much! That's exactly what I wanted to know 😊

If you're going for grass, there are various mesh reinforcements you can get for the grass to grow through, so that cars etc don't ruin it with muddy tracks. Something like this (but this one's just the first I came across with Google):

https://www.ultimate-one.co.uk/grass-reinforcement-and-ground-protection-grass-reinforcement-mesh-c-103_148

Good point about the gravel drainage! I wonder if you could just leave the gravel, and add mesh-reinforced turf over the top? (Expensive experiment if it doesn't work, though!)

Or just throw topsoil down. Level with feet pigeon stepping across and grass seed.

Just adding a note but if you're thinking of paving it keep the gravel in a big pile for the hardcore base

Offer the gravel on Freecycle/Facebook. There are people after it for free.

That's a good shout, thanks! I don't think I'll want to pave it - as I mentioned, I have a proper driveway already, so some simple grass ready to grow freely will do 😊

While you have the gravel, you can use weedkiller.

Pathclear is handy as it leaves a film that prevents new seeds germinating. It lasts several months.

If you disturb the surface you break up the film so clear it and pull up the weeds first.