[Jamie Butterworth]

My grandma and grandad have decided to remake there garden and have let me redesign it for them

First things first, the lawn is in a horrible state after having dogs digging and running over it for the past  15 years, it is full of pot holes and uneven patches of turf, anyone have any ideas of how to improve it and how to re seed it?

[robbodaveuk]

First of all, are the dogs still going to roam about on it, if they are there is not much point in wasting time on it. Assuming it is going to be dog free, I will tell you how I did mine. My lawn was in a real state a couple of years ago, the first thing I did was to take the top off down to bare soil and stacked all the turf (if you could call it that). This ended up as a lovely loam to go back on the garden. Then I dug out all perennial weed roots that I could find. Next step was to level it, taking high spots off and filling in the depressions, I had to take soil from the garden as well because there were more depressions than high spots. Once it was reasonably level I spent a long time with a rake going over the whole lawn area to get it as level as I could. I did all this in the winter, but had to wait till the ground was reasonably dry before I even touched it. It was then left for a couple of months to settle down, with me walking on it now and again to get a firm surface. Come March, I gently raked the surface and sowed the seeds, I just raked a couple of square metres at a time, seeded it and sprinkled a fine layer of MP compost on top to hide the seeds from the birds and stop them blowing away.

  Robbo.

[Jamie Butterworth]

Thanks for the advice robbo