Soil on top of grass advice

m_tariqs

Hello. I have a small garden. Good size patio and the grass part is around 5x7 meters. The patio is a good foot above the grass. I moved to this house a year ago and the grass is very neglected, more roots than grass so i was gonna kill the grass, drop existing 12x8 shed, fill with soil, put a smaller shed 8 x 6 up, and sow grass seeds and plants. Sounds simple ! However, over the months and after digging a few trees and stumps up im left with a very large mound of soil. Some questions
A. How / do i still need to kill the grass that is currently under the soil? I was thinking of spreading the soil around the garden but should i kill the grass before i do that?

B. Best, safe and humane way to kill tne grass?

Many thanks.

BobTheGardener

The grass will die and rot away in a few weeks if you put more than about 2 inches of soil on top.  However, if there are weeds such as dandelion in the lawn too, those will grow through quite a deep layer of soil layed on top of them so need to be dug-out first, or killed using a weedkiller, but those will take a long time to work at this time of the year (you have to wait until the leaves go brown or the root won't be killed) so probably not worth trying.  I would landscape it now and spot-treat any perennial weeds if they appear next year.

m_tariqs

Great. Thats what i was hoping for

m_tariqs

BobTheGardener said:

The grass will die and rot away in a few weeks if you put more than about 2 inches of soil on top.  However, if there are weeds such as dandelion in the lawn too, those will grow through quite a deep layer of soil layed on top of them so need to be dug-out first, or killed using a weedkiller, but those will take a long time to work at this time of the year (you have to wait until the leaves go brown or the root won't be killed) so probably not worth trying.  I would landscape it now and spot-treat any perennial weeds if they appear next year.

Could you suggest a good bulk weedkiller please? Am i able to use in this weather? Many thanks

BobTheGardener

No, that's one issue with weedkillers which are only effective when the plants are growing actively, so best applied in spring and summer.  If you try weedkillers now, they will either get washed-off by the rain or work so slowly that it'll take 'til spring before they kill the roots anyway.