Quick Stint of a Winter's Morning

Uprooted five or six more bushes during a quick visit this morning. Man, it's hard work. You see five or six stumps coming out of the ground, all within a foot of each other, and there's no way of telling if that's one plant or five or six. This fruit bush job was just a little something I did to pass the time whilst the Storm Desmond flood waters receded, and here I am, maybe ten hours into it, still not done. But this morning I counted up 13 more bushes, or thereabouts, to go, so that's another 2-3 hours, I can do them in one visit.
Speaking of the waters receding, I think they have as much as they're going to. This is how things looked on Saturday, - that's the hole-in-the-north-east-bed, (I can't call it a pond, yet, with its vertical sides) - and it's gone down a couple of inches since then. When I was digging it out, I noticed that within an inch of its top surface, the boulder clay was dry and powdery, so it must be pretty impervious to water. The top of the subsoil is where you can see a slightly shallower area in the foreground of the photo. Which means that all my puddling plans are meaningless, water just isn't going anywhere but through evaporation. Which is good news for the pond if not for the drainage. If you want a pond in this part of Glasgow, ffs, just dig a hole. 

And I can't believe my luck in digging that hole just when I did, before the rain got really heavy with Desmond. It's holding maybe 3 cubic metres of water, all which would have just been lying on and in the topsoil other wise. 

Jobs as I see them now are:

  • finish fruit bushes,
  • dig out and re-lay path
  • move all spoil from NE to NW bed
  • go back to Old Greenhouse/Midden area
  • excavate and shape pond
  • hang gate
  • mend fence by gate
  • tidy out and repair shed
  • level southern end
Then I can actually start cultivation... 

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