Chris and Bev – Heads in the Clouds

This week we’ve had three intensive days with Matt and Tristan and a hired six tonne digger. We’d saved up a few jobs that needed a big machine to get things going and we can now spend the next few weeks finishing them off, reverting to shovels and barrows and slow manual labour.

Job 1: levelling the area in front of the potting shed and greenhouse, where we’ll now build some raised veg beds and put some gravel paths in between. We also dug trenches for power and water and put in a soil pipe for the future outside loo.

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Job 2: placing blocks of Purbeck stone on the picnic and fire pit area to form a circle and some seating, satisfactorily tested out by Bev

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Job 3: sorting out the pile of rubbish that’s been a bit of an eyesore and separating out what could be burned and recovering earth from it. This included lots of stumps from our first clearance of the site which unfortunately are too bulky and wet to burn

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Job 4: digging a bog garden. On one slope there’s been a very boggy area where water draining off Barn Hill hits the surface. There wasn’t much we could do with it so we’ve shaped an area for the water to collect and incorporated some of the tree stumps and rocks

Job 5: going to the pub