Newbie from Plymouth

Hi , completely new to gardening but hey convince me it’s a fun pursuit!
tbh I’ve just started to enjoy it after doing my best to avoid it for almost 50 years. Anyway primarily I’ve joined for some advice about how to proceed with turfing my back garden.

we moved in a couple years ago and I haven’t done much apart from strimming the weeds.
Originally the garden sloped quite a bit so previous owners made the rear garden into 3 tiers. With the bottom tier grass. And a LOT of pampas grass. These were removed at great cost but left the ground very uneven. On trying to dig the ground to level it we discovered they had placed plastic sheets and plastic bags ( compost type bags split open) an inch or two under the surface. So when you stick the fork in you go through the plastic and can’t lift the fork.
We want to level it and re turf it.
So my questions are -
Will I need to remove all the plastic and dig all the weeds out?
Can I just put Earth / top soil over the top of everything to level it up , then turf on top? It will the weeds come through ?
Will I need to lay membrane down? or black plastic To kill the weeds first , then lift the plastic up ?

 

Hi and Welcome,

Rather strange that you are the second person this week with exactly the same problem of plastic sheets just under the surface !

Instead of repeating things, please have a look at this thread which should answer all your questions.

Helping restore Ma's garden

Anything not clear, just come on back.

 

Welcome to Gardeners Corner Adrian. The plastic was probably put down to keep the weeds down. It's started to perish and the weeds have forced their way back through. You will need to clear the garden of all the plastic and weeds/grass.

 

Hi @adrian pudner

 

Thanks everyone for the warm welcome.
I’ll give it another go digging out the plastic and report back how I get on.