Getting there....

This will hopefully soon be our vegetable garden or at least phase 1. We decided this was the the area that we would use for veg only to discover when we started to dig through what appeared to be rough ground with a bit of gravel over it, that it had about 40cm of hardcore over most of it. It seams at one point it had been used to park farm machinery on.

Now lesser mortals may have decided to dig in easier ground, but we persevered. After all there wasn't much else we could do with it. Unless we wanted to gave home to a tractor. Luckily, our neighbour has a jcb or two and popped down one day to dig a few holes. First hole went according to plan. The second however, we hit stone.

It appeared to be rubble from an old building and most of it was pulled out by the digger. Steven then took over and cleared it by hand. After a couple of hours we realised that under the rubble was some sort of structure. Now in other parts of the world this isn't a problem. But in Orkney you never know what may turn up. Could easily be anything from 5 to 5.000 years old. However turned out to be an old rectangular well, which filled with water as we cleared it. I'll blip it another day.

Steven has worked his socks off transforming the area. He's building wind barrier walls from old tyres (gladly provided and delivered by the local garage ). Put in raised beds which sit on top of holes about a metre deep and are filled with well rotted manure). Rolled out weed barrier material and covered it in gravel. He's still got to move the remains of the muck mountain and also the rubble that came out of the holes not to mention the ongoing rubber wall building.

After that all we'll need is a layer of soil on top of the beds and then hopefully we can get planting. Can't wait!