Plotting on..............

Here are some pictures to try and illustrate what I have been up to so far. I'm not sure how many hours labour I have invested in this project so far but it has been many. I do about 1 1/2 hours every lunchtime when Nathanael is sleeping. As you can see from 4th pic it is a long plot and I have moved along about 3/4 of it. From the level from tree trunk to the very right hand side there is at least a 80cm dip so that is why there is a massive mound of earth as, as I move left to right I have to dig deeper to reach the same level.

I went to homebase yesterday and got a wheelbarrow, yeah!!! This means that at some stage I can wheel the 8+ bags of heavy rubble I have to the car and to the dump. I also got an earth sieve which I cracked banging it against the wall. When I read the lable it said it was durable. Ha! I didn't bang it hard, honest governor! I also got an incinerator as I have loads of wood to burn from trimming trees and roots. If you zoom into right hand side of 4th pic you can see it by the fence.

The 3rd pic shows the really difficult roots which riddle the soil. I am painstakingly removing the earth from around them and then levering them out or the best part, sawing them in half, woopee. I love using all the tools I can get my hands on!

Pic number 2 is of some of the massive bricks, pottery and slabs of rock I have excavated!!! Oh and pic number one is the hired help on her tree stump!

I should have done a before picture to show you how much progress I have made but hey ho, that's the way it goes! I will continue with my labouring, which my back has stood up to so far!!!

Updates soon..................................NN XX

p.s please note in pic 4 on the wall, the small radio (five live) and the big Arsenal mug which holds the tea necessary to complete excavation works.

What's in the plot or have I lost it?

Sooooooooooo, I have been gardening daily recently trying to clear a plot of land roughly 20 metres by 3 metres which is on the left side of my garden.

My visage is for it to be a veg plot but that dream is becoming more unreal as I dig deeper and discover how poor the soil quality is and how riddle with tree roots it is.

I don't think I can rival JDH's finds from his clearance of the hedge but here is what I have found to date:

Glass (loads and loads of shattered sheets)
Broken and unbroken archaic milk bottles (I will restore 2 to their former glory)
An assortment of metal handles
Sheets of metal
A metal rod 3cm thick and 2m long
A longer priece of metal about 3m long.
A white metal jug
Bones from a deseased animal (cat maybe from the size of the vertebrae)
Rusted gardening fork
Rusted gardening trowel
One mouldy gardening glove
Curtain rings
Corugated material
Loads of pottery
Enough bricks to build a bbq!
3 hibernating frogs (oops, I relocated them to a new pile)
Rusted metal box

And that's from digging up one half. The rest is very difficult as there are so may roots winding around as the plants I have cut down have big roots plus there is a tree stump as well.

I can't put my spade in the ground without hearing 'clang' as there are sooooo many rocks and bits of glass. It will take a lot more labour to make anything worthy of the plot. So it will be many more hours of toil while Nathanael sleeps at lunchtime!

I'm still waiting to dig up a body but I might have to go a bit deeper for that!