A load of BS

About a week ago we ordered a load of muck from Alan. The drop off was arranged for today, and Doug had kindly agreed to let Alan dump the load at the front of his plot (you can't drive onto ours) from where we could shift it to it's pallet bay home. We arrived mid morning to find the steaming pile waiting. It was massive, and after a few minutes shoveling we realised that the bay Ben had made for it wasn't going to be big enough. So, we dug up the two pallets that were the fence at the front of the plot, and picked up another one from the hut - enough to extend the bay and make a door for the front. Ben got on with this while I sorted out the flower bed at the front of the plot - digging over, replacing the pallet fence with some old posts, and planting poached egg plants, Love-in-the-mist, flax (linum rubrum), french marigolds, and sunflowers from RHS Wisley via Kate.

Once the muck bay was done it was back to shovelling. it took hours! But by the end everything was looking neat, and there wan't much trace of the pile left on Doug's plot. We're planning on leaving the pile to rot until the autumn/winter when we'll apply it as a mulch to keep the weeds down and to be dug in in the spring. In the mean time We'll try planting a few squashes directly into it.

Ben gave the Compost heap a turn and we mixed in the mucky grass clipping raked from where the pile had been, and the goosegrass we'd cleared from under the plum trees.

The other big job for the day was weeding. Ben tidied up the carrot beds (germination looks to have been pretty succesful) and I removed the grass that was growing up around the lavender bushes.

We picked a mammoth harvet of purple sprouting broccoli (some for dinner, the rest for the freezer) but left the small side shoots to grow some more. And John gave us some rhubarb, so the 6 hours spent working felt well worth it.