Leveled and Turfed with more room to grow!

Backyards in Melbourne's metro regions are becoming short in supply with the average house land blocks reducing to 350 - 400 square meters which is quite a sad state of affairs. Not only does this reduce the land people can build a home on resulting in smaller dwellings. But all the wonderful life skills of growing your own vegetable garden is significantly impacted and kids of tomorrow won't know what it's like to go from garden to plate.

All those beautifully organically grown and natural foods removed from many peoples diets solely for supermarket GM grown fruit and veg.

We did things a little different in order to retain land so we can grow a garden and spend life out doors as we enjoy being connected to land and the environment. Instead of building a mini McMansion we built a smaller humbler home and chose a double story dwelling so we could retain our backyard.

This weekend we hired some pretty impressive toys to remove 200mm of clay as our area is clay based soil and then ship in top soil to prepare for turf laying and a boarder to enable an edible garden. Little Bloke was keen to get in on the action and wanted a turn digging up the yard but unfortunately he isn't old enough yet to get in on the action so had to settle for watching through the window.

I previously attempted to do it by hand but struggled under the conditions of the soil as Clay can turn into a hard cover and breaking through requires significant strength and the use of specialized tools. Bringing in the big guns was a lot easier and the work was done in a few hours.

disbursing the soil was also even easier no need for multiple wheel burrow trips and within 6 hours the whole backyard was cleared, leveled and topped up.

The kids couldn't help themselves and decided to get amongst the dirt despite my protests as they would bring mud into the house! lol but who can get in the way with children playing in the dirt and having some fun!

A quick foot spa and we were all cleaned up and ready to get back into the house, but as always this didn't last long with little miss running back out there the first chance she got :)

Day 2 was upon us and it was time to get back to work but not before noticing a giant T-Rex decided to come and visit us which I had to show little bloke who absolutely loves Dinosaurs! He was straight out of bed rushing to the back yard to see it but unfortunately the T-Rex had already moved along before we got there :(

We called in the big guns to help out with the work and between four of us the backyard was getting laid in no time! The kids watched eagerly by as we went to work making the backyard look beautiful.

The kids wanted to pitch in also but couldn't as the grass turf was a little too heavy for them.
We selected Tif Tuff Turf which has been specially designed for heavy traffic and commonly used on sporting grounds due to it's ability to remain green all year round, do well in droughts and can take a bashing from being used often.

Having young kids and pet's the backyard will get used a lot and being in Australia with drought conditions the grass will benefit us. You're supposed to wait 3 weeks for it to set and water it heavily but those with kids know that this is all but impossible :)
And there it is the finished product with plenty of room to start growing our own edible garden and place a few raised vegetable garden beds. We still have our side garden growing and we will report back on that soon!