ship shape in the evenings

The light evenings since the clocks changed have made a big difference to our workrate.

The first job came from a windfall. The community group that has a plot on our site is doing a load of work at the moment, they have had some luck with funding and resource allocation, so will be making a big push to sort out the space we have given them, with our help. This means a certain amount of clearing of their plot, one of which has a lot of gravel in it. Our Secretary made sure that they weren't considering just throwing it away and we are now working at moving it around to where it is needed.

First lot he moved to a big boggy area on the main path, and then a second batch we wheeelbarrowed away to our Leanhouse™ to make a floor for it. It is particularly boggy there (one of the reasons for siting it there - the soil was too damp to use as a bed) but now it has a ground sheet down and gravel on top, to keep the weeds at bay, make it look a little neater, and improve drainage. There is still plenty of gravel though, so we will have to get some other uses for it going. Probably communal paths.


This also coincided nicely with us retiring some metal shelves from use at home, so we reconfigured those as Leanhouse™ staging, putting the shelves on the wrong way up to form shallow trays. They are the perfect size for grow bags and seed trays. They cost us a few pounds about 10 years ago, so we are definitely getting our money's worth!


They are almost full now a couple of days later, we have mixed salad, peas, beans, broccoli, kale, chard, lettuce, all sorts of stuff just sowed or as young seedlings, in there.

Also in are the potatoes, we have gone for Arran Pilots and Desiree this year. We used compost from our functional bath, the Bath o' Salad, to go in the trenches, and then refilled the bath with new stuff ready for lettuce seedlings, which are now in.

And then last night we did a bit of spring cleaning rather than planting. We had put the last of our home produced compost in an old broken bath which was sitting there and looking unattractive and taking up room, so I dragged out a black compost bin and transferred it all to that. The cracked bath is now in the skip. Once that was gone we rediscovered a metal arch underneath it, so that has now been installed in the middle of the 'flower' bed ready for sweet peas to climb up.

And the old strawberry plants have been transplanted from their overgrown bed to a nicely cleared new one. That leaves up clear to do some serious grass removal in that bed in preparation for the squash going in.

All in all it is coming together, I reckon a couple more evenings and we may have it in a fairly neutral state, with all the beds ready to go.