Dad's employment of respite (5)
The iPhone's not charging, so it's sitting on a coffee table until I get into the city centre and get it sorted out. Which means I've been developing a wonderful freedom all this week, from calls, updates, messages and most of all, the time. Been busy at the allotment, and I've noticed that I work longer when I don't have a clock to refer to: 3 or 4 hours as against the usual 2. Which means I've done a lot this week, but by last night, Friday, was utterly exhausted: taking the dogs around the block for their last walk at 11ish last night was quite a chore, just putting one foot in front of the other.
Weeding, digging over, riddling soil, shovelling horse shit. I cleared the whole old greenhouse area, breaking up its 7in thick layer of compacted earth, and revealing the whole of the path beneath; there was an ash-filled break in the path at the East end, so I assume it was once heated from a stove of some sort there.
Another heap of tbr (to be riddled) earth is on the boundary of the North and Mid West beds: when I excavated the area where the new shed is to go, I foolishly scattered the earth, full of glass and rubble, onto the beds; I then raked it up into a heap, ignored it, and weeds started growing through it. So I'm dealing now with a classic reminder of a job put-off until another day. And I broke up the ridiculous mound which lay between the old greenhouse foundation wall, and the Eastern boundary; all of that wants riddling too.
There's still a lot of broken glass amongst this soil, and one of the dogs has badly cut her paw - I don't know if she did it at the allotment, but that looks the most likely explanation. So the next job is to get all the tbr earth heaped up in one place, the old greenhouse area, where I can keep the dogs away from it until I can get it riddled: a tedious task, made much more so when there's lumps of wet clay through it, which need to be broken up by hand to pass through the riddle's grid.
After the heaping-up of tbr earth, finish off the digging over the mid-west bed, and get it manured and sown with Hungarian rye. Then I can return to the riddling, using the rubble for the new gravel drain/path, and the new shed base.
Weeding, digging over, riddling soil, shovelling horse shit. I cleared the whole old greenhouse area, breaking up its 7in thick layer of compacted earth, and revealing the whole of the path beneath; there was an ash-filled break in the path at the East end, so I assume it was once heated from a stove of some sort there.
Another heap of tbr (to be riddled) earth is on the boundary of the North and Mid West beds: when I excavated the area where the new shed is to go, I foolishly scattered the earth, full of glass and rubble, onto the beds; I then raked it up into a heap, ignored it, and weeds started growing through it. So I'm dealing now with a classic reminder of a job put-off until another day. And I broke up the ridiculous mound which lay between the old greenhouse foundation wall, and the Eastern boundary; all of that wants riddling too.
There's still a lot of broken glass amongst this soil, and one of the dogs has badly cut her paw - I don't know if she did it at the allotment, but that looks the most likely explanation. So the next job is to get all the tbr earth heaped up in one place, the old greenhouse area, where I can keep the dogs away from it until I can get it riddled: a tedious task, made much more so when there's lumps of wet clay through it, which need to be broken up by hand to pass through the riddle's grid.
After the heaping-up of tbr earth, finish off the digging over the mid-west bed, and get it manured and sown with Hungarian rye. Then I can return to the riddling, using the rubble for the new gravel drain/path, and the new shed base.
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