Remember when I told you I had a LOT more digging to do? Well the time has come... aka it's digging time!!
Yeeeeeaaaahh soooo I dug up my lawn. This feels like a Blue Peter 'here's one I made earlier moment', as I can just show you the almost finished result with no regard for the struggle in between. BELIEVE ME ...it was a struggle! I must give a shout to my good friend Steph (Hi) for "lending" me his wheelbarrow for this, as without it I don't think this would have happened. I say "lending" because it may or may not still be in my garden to this day...
Alright, back to the point and enough of reminding Steph I'm a thief. I dug up my lawn because another childhood ambition was to flatten out this part of the garden as well.
It was just a really awkward uphill bumpy mess that we couldn't really use before, so I knew one day I wanted to flatten it and make a seating area there. Over the years we have thrown the occasional bbq but we have never had a designated area to just sit and enjoy the oh-so rare British summer sun. We had a table and some chairs that just got shifted up and down the garden, but they never really had a home, so this diggin-tervention (see what I did there) was to cure that problem.
One of the problems that you little beauties might be already realising, is that when you dig up a lot of soil, it really needs to go somewhere. In this case, as I had no skip, one of two things had to happen... I either had to spend £££ on a skip to dump all the waste (I don't like spending £££), or find some way to make use of a mountain of extra topsoil. If only there was some sort of uneven front garden that needed soil somewhere I wonder, hmmmmm...
[ GARDENING TIP ] I've already given you a couple of tips on when to dig, but here is a couple of tips on how. I have found it is easier to combine the use of a garden hoe and fork when digging large areas. Use your garden hoe to section up your turf or soil into a grid-like pattern. This will allow you to dig up the soil with the fork in reasonable sized sections and make them easier to transport. This is also the technique you can use when laying new turf in your garden. You would just remove a lot less soil from the ground and strive for a perfectly level finish using a spirit level.