A message

Just a very quick - but BIG - thank you to friends unseen for the e-mails and messages on our guest-book.   And all I'm doing is digging, slow but sure!

Sunday, 31st October, to Thursday, 4th November, 2004

What to say - yet more digging?   But I'll certainly have half the plot ready for growing next year - and if we get a few good weekends through November, just possibly quite a bit more.   Now I can get closer to the bee hives, I've got the brambles, willow(?), and raspberry canes scythed off the wildest corner.

Sunday - warm enough to dig in shirt sleeves, with bumble bees, wasps and honey bees all out and busy; had to run off the plot a couple of times when honey bees got themselves caught in my hair!   Even saw a tortoiseshell flitting around - just a little bit odd to see such summer colour against the background of the autumn tints of trees and pumpkins, bare shrubs, and dead plants!

Monday - I got warm enough to work in shirt sleeves, but the weather was cold enough to bring out a couple of robins.   They were still very shy - until they found the turves laden with slug eggs I'd laid on the compost heap!

And this afternoon - just more digging!   My style of digging has changed a LOT - nothing like having to cope with such heavy clay soil for developing a simpler, easier style!   I'm a bit slower - but the job is going much more quickly, simply because I can dig for a LOT longer.

6th-30th November, 2004

We've a couple of real bonfire builders on the site!   Had a brilliant bonfire night - loads of the plot-holders, kids, good food and drink, fireworks; and a proper bonfire with a guy.   Kids loved it.

By the time I got the kids back on Sunday, thinking to help with the clear up, you'd not know anything had happened, apart from the still smouldering ashes.

Got another good afternoon's digging done - but my spade broke!   The actual blade has "torn" - it's not the welding, or any other obvious weak spot; wouldn't mind, but it wasn't a cheap one either.

New one?   Yup - but a real cheapo, just to get this first digging finished.   I haven't had a chance to use it yet - after all the back-breaking digging, moving bricks and boulders, I managed to get a slipped disk; no, not on the plot, but in a classroom as I stretched up to write the date on the whiteboard!

No manure arrived yet - but these hard frosts the last few mornings are (I hope) doing their work on the clods.