Artificial grass

[Declan52]

So it looks like a full on garden revamp is on the to do list with the main item being artificial grass. As a keen golfer I am looking for a shorter pile , 11-16mm, and the wide variety on offer isnt helping.

There is a range store close to me and they do a grass that is £10 a sqm. And at the other end of the scale there are companies close by doing golf suitable grass for £30 sqm.

 

The roll from the range looks dead on to me but it's only available in 2m wide rolls. The other stuff comes  4m wide so I will have a lot more seams to join up. 

 

Has anyone put anything similar in their gardens and more specifically for anyone from Northern Ireland  who did yours.

 

[divorcingjack]

We're going for artificial grass too, as it's great with kids, they can play on it straight after rain with no mud to track through the house. Also, we're sitting on 1000 tonnes of hardcore, so growing natural lawn is not happening ... 

 

I've got quite a few samples of the more expensive stuff and it is surprisingly realistic, with brown bits in and variety of individual blade shapes and orientations. Are you concerned about the look at all, I think that the cheaper stuff is often too bright green and shiny and looks very plasticky. I'd order a load of samples and leave them outside for a while so you catch them out of the corner of your eye every time you walk past! Is it a large area? If not, it might not actually be too much of a difference in cost to upgrade. 

 

 

[newhome]

We laid it in our last house about 16 years ago. It was the thicker pile however, not for golf. We did go for the most expensive type (at the time) as we wanted it to last. Think we paid circa £20+ m2 back then but it was still looking decent 15 years later (old house was on the market last year and I saw a photo). 

 

We laid it ourselves and the vast majority of the time was for the ground prep. Lots of time stripping the old lawn, making sure the ground was level and well compacted, type 1, timber fixings round the perimeter, decent landscaping fabric, granite dust as the top layer and well compacted, and only then was the turf ready to be laid. You need to take the drainage of your garden into account and prep accordingly otherwise water can lie on top in pools. 

 

I’ve seen artificial lawns laid from cheaper turf and they have creased. The turf needs to be heavy enough to stay down using its own weight and the pile density is important too as the less dense ones will lie flat after it’s walked on. UV protection is important too. Also some artificial turf needs sand brushed into it and some doesn’t. Ours didn’t and we used to vacuum it with an outdoor vac. 

 

The only issue we had with it was in a dark corner of the garden where there wasn’t much natural light and black patches appeared in the winter. Probably a sort of mould but we used to spray it with mould killer that addressed the issue. 

[Declan52]

The prep work is as always key as you say. I need to dig out 100mm of top soil and then wack in quarry dust as my base. Overall there is approx 60sqm to do in a L shape layout. 

As I need a golf ball to roll on it the pile is quite short so all the samples I have seen so far look the near enough the same. For the 30mm deep luxury grass you can see the difference in the good stuff and the crap. Some are really thick and others patchy.