This morning, after a late night on the sauce last night, I really wasn’t feeling it, but thought a bit of a spell in the fresh air would either perk me up or wipe me out. I wanted to (start to) tackle the expanse of weeds that the Field of Dreams has turned into, and my plan was to lay out cardboard, which we have stored in the wood shed.
Turns out that the boxes we have stored there are only enough to cover a really small area, so I had to devise a plan B – one that didn’t involve buying a load of stuff on Amazon to get more boxes :D. I decided to redeploy the black plastic from the “big old bed” back onto the Field where it was originally used.
About half way through last year I spread card on the big-old-bed then put black plastic over it – I’d been piling pulled weeds and other compost on the bed before I did so, which hopefully by now will have broken down a bit. I didn’t excavate anything before putting compost over today, because no-dig, innit. I also forgot to take a picture of the state of the ground before covering it with compost, so here (above) is the appearance of a small corner of the uncovered ground befroe it was re-covered with a layer of compost that I fear will be too thin. The compost heap that’s “cooking” at the moment has been doing so for a good 6 months or so, and has sunk down quite a lot, so in a month or so I may distribute its contents on this bed.
(click to embiggen – pano taken after today’s efforts)
The compost I spread came from a couple of the other beds – I piled the potato & cauliflower beds quite high at the end of last year, for example, because I wanted to get the woodchip away from where Steve parks his car before it rotted down completely and turned into an impromptu flower bed – so I moved some earth around, and raked over a couple of beds.
In a bonus move I turned up a couple of surprise potatoes in one bed, one of which was too bug-infested to be useful, but the other of which is turning into creamy potato, celery and ham soup (along with other ingredients, obvs) for lunch as I type 😀
The seed potatoes arrived yesterday, so I’m well poised (from a seed perspective, anyway) for spring planting.
Tomorrow the plan is more clearing of the space where we intend to put a small greenhouse – I really didn’t fancy operating the wood-chipper on a minor hangover, so early night tonight and hard at it tomorrow!