Gramps Garden Makeover Pt3

When the house was built, we gave the builders 10 m from the back of the
house to trash... and so since they finished in Sept '02 we have worked through this area.

First was getting the drainage right, so the ground level was shaped to
drain centrally to a stormwater pit (which I, as a qualified plumber?!, had
to modify). The high-rainfall events which separate the longer dry spells
here made life interesting anyway!

Then the area for paving was layered with white road base and compacted with a vibrating plate compactor (many times) to a thickness of ~5 inches.
A little quarry dust and a further compaction followed by a thin layer of bedding sand was used to lock the base in. Given the lack of straight lines and overt signs of order in the rest of the garden, the random paving approach seemed good (at the time...).

The gentle funnel shape of the area didn't seem to be covered in any of the "How to" books and guides... Funny how they all describe a flat area with a gentle slope - must be EASIER or omething! The stone came a three batches of offcuts - about a quarter of it with nice red colouring, a half of it was strong pale sandy colour and the rest was a slightly crumbly rust-tinged type. In the end it was a 35-odd square metre jigsaw puzzle... so we spread out most of the sawn sandstone on the area that will be grass. Then decided to make a path out of the red stuff (and we absolutely lucked-in by guesstimating there was enough for a 90 cm wide path!). Screeding off nice level sand areas is fine unless you have an inquisitive dish-licker on hand 24/7. So it was small areas at a time.

Challenges were many: the nominal 20 mm slices were between 15 and 25 mm,
the curving slope made the placement of long pieces difficult, the nature of them being offcuts meant that some shapes were more common than others
(especially 100 mm wide strips of stone), and moving the larger pieces (up to a square metre in area). Also, another serious 50 mm rain event ran interference!

The edges were locked-in with a standard mortar mix. The between-stone mortar was made by mixing off-white cement with carefully dried Dooen loam (a local sand masquerading as soil).

This was used to give a more natural and sympathetic colour than the grey mortar mix. I still need to remove
surface discolouration from mortar or coat it to bring back to intensity of
colour (note the wet versus dry areas in the following photos)

Once that was done (and all that stone was laid or moved), the turf came the next focus... Between the driveway and the paving was an area of about
35 sqm for turf. We figure that our entire yard is mostly low water-use native, so a bit of turf for the dog to roll on, and children to play on would be a justifiable tradeoff.

The soil level was shaped to drain to the same spot as the paving, had 9 popup sprinklers trenched in, a plastic edge strip put into the pipe-trenches, and the area covered in 50 mm of sandy loam.

Laying the turf was easy, given a couple of guiding influences: lay a full-width strip along all the edges and keep the water up to it for the first 3-4 days. I used an old pair of garden shears to cut the turf. I did set the system to water for the (permitted) 20 mins after 11pm each night, but this is too much - as determined by the slight run-off evident
in the street gutter. After tweaking it back it gets less than 15 mins, with no evidence of run-off. I will try out lower rates when I'm not away for work so often.

Finished product currently needs cutting pretty frequently, but is about to host an after-wedding event, so we'll work on that later... here's how it looked a few weeks ago.

We used some leftover 100 mm wide strips of stone to build a small stone wall to retain some sandy soil for some grass trees. One is planted and is currently mulched with a reddish mulch (to contrast with the euchy mulch elsewhere). The small tree in front is a coral gum that is going gangbusters!

The last instalment (but not least!) is Part 4 the front yard complete with soak!