Stones

No rowing today. Knackered after a long hard day in the garden. Must have "chumba wumba'd" (this is what we call the action of putting things in the new shredder) six bagfuls today, which is an awful lot. Took on the yew tree, the pyracanthus, the lonicera, a few of the pleached hornbeams and other stuff. The shredder has a bottomless appetite and there is something deeply satisfying about watching a 2m yew branch make its way through. Grunga-grunga-grunga-grunga...

I then decided to take on the lawn. Our local garden centre (100m away) sells sheets of turf (about 0.8m x 1.5m) for three quid. Our lawn has many spots where grass does not like to grow. We know that this is because the lawn was laid on top of crap soil that is full of stones. (A long story but basically the garden was in a terrible state when we got it and we have no real top soil.)

So, the plan was to investigate the ground under the bare patches, sieve out the stones, add some sand, replace the soil and cover with fresh new turf. Well, this was hard work! I dug about six holes but however far down I went I found stones. There were a lot of big stones and these probably cause the weakness in the grass in the bare patches. In the last patch I found a sewer pipe! This was long abandoned and probably was a drain pipe from the old cess-pit we found when digging up the garden. It was a substantial pipe and in the end I filled it with some of the stones and left it. Digging the whole pipe up would be a massive job assuming it goes off happily in both directions. It MUST end in one direction since that is the direction that we lowered to a slope. The JCB would not have noticed a pipe of that size.

I ended up with unbelievable numbers of stones. More than enough to lift comfortably. I think about one eighth of the soil I dug out was stones bigger than my sieve holes. Some were bigger than my fist. I ended up whacking the bottom of my 20cm deep holes with a pick axe to break it up a little. Not sure how this will help the grass since their roots are well above that level, but hey.

Metres today: 0