A client recently contacted us regarding a development that they had undertaken. They had purchased a piece of land that had once had a house on it and wanted us to come and visit. So we headed on down to have a look at this project.
Upon visiting the site, the ground had been compacted exceptionally hard due to all the machine traffic on it. What was also exceptionally apparent was the size and volume of stones that were littered over an acre of land. An acre of land that the client wanted to be a lawn. We explained to the client that we had two very large problems here, stones, and lack of soil. But, after explaining that we could fix this and have a lawn growing within 6 weeks they told us to go ahead. So here’s how we did it:
First step was to go in with a small compact tractor and front loader and remove as many of the stones that were larger than fist size as possible. We ended up removing some 15 tons! Next step, we needed to soften up the ground and dig up the stones buried in the top 6 inches or so of soil. So we then brought in a rotavator on a John Deere 4066M
The rotavator loosened up the top layer of soil and dug out any buried stones within the top 6 inches of the soil. Once this was finished the land looked like below
There’s ALOT of rocks there! Most of those are literally the remains of a house that was there once upon a time, and as is fairly standard in these situations, instead of disposing of the rubble properly it is literally buried in the back garden. Once this was done we had to repeat the first process and hand remove all the very large stones. With the ground clear of stones we then brought in 240 tons of screeded top soil and using our little John Deere 2038R and it’s handy 220R front loader to spread the soil across the garden
Once the soil was spread, the next step was to use a box blade to level the ground to the customers specifications. Normally you can also roll the land at this point, but because the tractors had driven over it so much in spreading out the soil we didn’t need to do this. So, we just went in with the box blade and levelled it all out.
After we levelled it, the final step was to bring in our dimple seeder and we laid 220 kgs of grass seed into the ground
We supplied the client with a hose computer, two sprinklers and a few hundred feet of hoses. The hose computer was set to turn the sprinklers on every 6 hours for 20 minutes. We instructed the clients to ensure to move the sprinklers ideally once a day, just leave the water turned on and the hose computer would manage all the water distribution for them.
We also warned them to walk the area regularly, and any weeds they saw come up, especially thistles, to remove them immediately, or given the ground had been scorched, they would rapidly overtake the grass there and they’d have a huge weed problem to deal with
Finally, that there, is how you turn an acre of rubble into an acre of grassland. If you are facing a similar situation then get in touch and we’ll be happy to quote!
tom@hampshirepaddockmanagement.com
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