more vegetable garden progress

It is taking so long to convert this old section of the orchard into vegetable garden beds - due to the interlacing tangle of tree roots beneath the meagre soil.



But, 'hey presto', a magic moment came at the weekend when Roger fired up the digger and ripped through those roots as though they were strands of cotton. Work that would have taken, quite literally months, was completed in hours. Oh, the wonders of mechanisation!!

And while Roger pulled levers, we scrambled around the big digger 'bucket' like children of the third world at a landfill site, dragging roots from the soil and barrowing them away. I'd guess we took about three cubic metres of roots out of the soil by the time we had finished the days work.

Then, joy of joys, we arrived to begin building the new raised beds and found that while we had been relaxing at Gardeners' World Live, Judith and Roger had made the first two beds of the next run.

We added three wheelbarrows of well-rotted muck and two of leafmould to each bed before planting deschampsia sespitosa (200!), verbascum phoenicium, echinops retro, panicum vergatum as well as hosta's bagged from Gardeners' World Live and skimmia japonica we had taken as cuttings at 'the back end' (the fall).

A dusting of calcified seaweed and then a good watering and the beds look as though they've always been there....