Improving Soil for New Lawn & veg patch

I want to lay 20sqm of lawn and make a 15sqm vegetable patch.

The soil is london clay with added brick dust- very poor. When dry it's really dusty. pH is getting toward 8. At present I am 3 and a bit cubic metres short of material to bring it up to the desired level (currently in the veg patch area). So I'm wondering what that material should be.

I can get hold of some rotted manure quite cheaply - should I be adding sand too?

 

Hi bopsysdad

Welcome to the forum.

Probably the best material for both your lawn and your veg patch is top soil. Yes, it's expensive but not too bad if you shop around and buy in bulk. I wouldn't add sand at all unless you knew for certain that you had a bad drainage problem.

You can add manure to your vegetable patch but not to your lawn area because it would make the soil too puffy and too rich in localised patches. Grass just needs 150 -200mm depth of reasonable material to grow in. It will grow on all kinds of stones, builder's rubbish and gravel but it won't have any resilience and at the first sign of warm weather, it'll go brown and die off. Gradually, the grass will disappear and be replaced by every tough weed in creation. That's what I found when I moved to my current garden.

If you're mixing manure into your vegetable patch, don't try growing any root crops in it for a whole growing season. It makes them grow into weird shapes....

 

Thanks Flinty

Hmm. I'm not really sure I can afford to buy in 3m3 of topsoil just now.

I was planning to fill in the hole in the veg patch now and leave it over winter (perhaps with a protective green manure crop or something?) And thought I'd mix the manure 50/50 with the existing soil depth (40/60 if I'm feeling energetic)

I was going to turf the lawn asap so that we might get some use out of it this year. Not ideal I know. I figured working a bit of organic something thoroughly into the area would give it a better chance. Please tell me if this sounds reasonable or if I'd be wasting my time (and money).

 

Very wise to let your veg patch settle over winter and then start food production next spring. I've never used a green manure myself - sounds interesting. However it won't matter if you leave your veg patch dug over roughly and exposed to the elements.

Your ratio for mixing the manure sounds a bit too generous to me. You'll get massive leaves from all that nitogen and have to beat them back into the ground with a stick!
Personally, I'd go for about 25/75 manure/existing soil.

Yes, midsummer is not a good time to try and establsh a new lawn - too hot, too dry. And if you're hoping to use it before the end of the summer, your only hope is to use turfs which can be rather spendy. You'll need to water it a lot. Better to wait till autumn really.

Working organic material into the soil will help to give your grass resilience and it might be worth costing up a lorry load of one of those non-peat based soil improvers, created at recycling centres. Some people are worried they might contain diseases but I've used them for planting shrubs and never had a problem. Frankly, under you lawn, a few spores of this and that are not going to matter much.