In order to provide a bit of extra turning space – especially for any large vehicles that might end up near the garages – without having an even larger expanse of paving, there’s a 1.8m wide strip of Marshalls Grassguard permeable paving blocks between the main area of Plasmor Sorrento Permi-8 permeable block paving and the new Hornbeam hedge. Alternative products which do roughly the same thing are available – typically based on plastic grids – but the Grassguard blocks are substantial concrete units that do a good job of holding the rest of the block paving in place.

The builders roughly filled the blocks with ‘soil’ as they were being installed, but this wasn’t good quality soil and contained a lot of stones. It also settled quite a lot – but that left about a 20mm gap which was straightforward to fill with better quality topsoil – sieved to remove stones and weed roots. After that had settled slightly after being watered-in there was room to sow grass seed and then top up with a few additional millimetres of sieved topsoil.

After a month, the grass seed has mostly germinated (along with too many weeds) though with little rain it has seemed sensible to water the area every few days.

Marshalls Grassguard Paving Blocks by Marsh Flatts Farm Self Build Diary is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.