How to fix lawn where car drives over

Question

my car needs to park slightly over my lawn. Unfortunately this has ruined my lawn slightly.

I'm wondering what is the best option to fix this or are there alternative solutions, such as going artificial grass? It dirties my wheels everytime now since there's no more grass. And I feel if I add more grass, the problem will reoccur.

Im trying to not affect resale as much.

Answer 1

You have several alternatives. The choice between them depends on your budget, your skills, and the finish level:

1. Permeable plastic pavers or other geocell-type products. These allow the grass to grow while holding the weight of the car. They are quite popular in Germany. The main difficulty in installing them is removing the current soil.
2. Remove the grass, put some landscape fabric, sand, and pavers. This is probably the easiest, since you can probably carry the pavers in your car (assuming you are not paving the whole yard!), and have some sand delivered.
3. Remove grass, put some landscape fabric, and add gravel. Like on the previous alternative, you can have the gravel delivered. It won't look as neat as pavers, but it'll work at keeping the car clean. The landscape fabric is there to prevent the gravel from mixing with the soil below it.
4. Pour concrete. Probably the hardest, but definitely the most durable.
5. As suggested by others, concrete pavers designed to allow grass to grow. I love the look of these, but they can take some skill to install, and will require you to dig up to 12" below grade to install an 8" gravel base on top of which you'll install the pavers. In my opinion, that's a job best left to a landscape contractor.

Artificial grass looks terrible and cheap, and I'm not even sure it can work for this type of problem.

Answer 2

There's a class of concrete pavers specifically designed to allow grass to grow, but also handle vehicles. They are used for agriculture too - to stop animal based erosion around water sources.

So you could pave the entire yard, but it would still be somewhat "grassy".

I don't think artificial grass is a good solution here - how would you keep it clean?.

(Image Ref: remodeling.hw.net )

Answer 3

While trying to fix a similar problem myself, I found a Ground Protection Mesh product that might be just what you need. You may be able to find a more local vendor with a similar product. It's a protective mesh made of HDPE that simply gets laid down on the ground where you need it, and the grass grows through it. The mesh prevents pedestrian and vehicle traffic from digging into the soil, protecting the grass.

As to affecting your resale, it shouldn't. The mesh could likely be pulled up without much long-term disruption to the yard. Some spots that are subject to repeated vehicle traffic might become firmly embedded into the ground though.