A whole lot of slabs

Collected the freecycle 18" square slabs. Not too bad these, can pick up two at a time. Just managed to get all 30 into the car without overloading it, so just one trip - things aren't so free if you use 2 gallons of diesel to collect ! Dropped off at lottie, and then back to get the eBay slabs. Hmm. These are the proper 24" square concrete jobbies and weigh a ton ! Ten of twenty loaded up and delivered - the rest will just have to wait. Aching limbs

Lazy days

Guilt setting in. Lovely couple of days in Edinburgh - managed to walk the Castle and Royal Mile on crutches without too much payback, then back home on Sunday, before Monday morning dash to Hampshire on a course for four days. Would really rather be digging and turning and tilling and raking.

Slabs (some paid for some freecycle), and bricks (paid for) should be here at the weekend, so it will be time to regroup and see what I've got. The oak will come here when I have time. Sacrilege really, for ease of access the builders chainsawed a perfect pitch oak building framework into "manageable chunks". At least I benefit - otherwise someone somewhere would be having a beautiful oak framed barn erected !

By the way, the Australian asparagus (see earlier posts) is doing fab and will shortly have to go into the garden proper.

Fingers crossed too for the automatic spade - awaiting ebay countdown !

Slab day Saturday

Brought some slabs on eBay in preparation for the shed base. The next day I found some on freecycle, what irony

Greenhouse plans (1)

I managed to delete the page, and the comment from Paul and Melanie - apologies ! Hopefully this is the link to greenhouse plans draft 1

Initial budget was £200, but it's looking like more than £300. Not too bad though for bespoke structure, as long as you forget the days it will take me to work out and build....

Base	Slabs - Freecycled !	£0
Wall	Bricks - 250 single or 500 double wall	£100
OR	Oak Beams - Fingers crossed on sourcing here	£0
Structure	2"*2"*@300ft pressure treated timber	£100
Glazing	4mm twinwall polycarbonate, mostly precut 610mm*1220mm for ease	£150
Misc	Fixtures and fittings	£30

Digging Starts

Well we've made a start  on the soil. Black polythene, courtesy of polyfast (good price fantastic delivery) over one of the beds-to-be and the barrows of turf, and half of one bed dug and tillered. So 10% of primary digging completed - doesn't look a lot but feels massive. Spuds !

Our first bags of manure and a free shed

A dozen or so bags of well rotted horse manure - who ever would have thought that would be an exciting event ? And they will be perfect for weiging down the plastic over the barrows when we get around to that task.

A free shed ! Well almost. It won't cost anything as it's our own shed, from the garden - we will just move the shed contents into the garage (huh? where will we put all the junk in the garage - need to work that one out first), and then dismantle the shed and move to the allotment. Then we get to fill up the space where the shed was with a greenhouse. Only, it's right next to the trampoline so glass is out and polycarb is in - meaning a design and build greenhouse. Bring on visio.

Start of the hard work

Finally decisions made (turfcut !) and the weather with us, we made a start on the physical work. Needless to say I left my carefully designed computer generated plans at home so just went with the flow.

• 20 foot patch at the top for chickens, shed, compost and all that
• 5 lots of 9 foot wide beds with 2 foot paths between. 9 foot width totally arbitrary of course and based only on 'that looks a bit narrow better make it a bit wider !' - the 2 foot path width because that's just slightly wider than the mower wheels.
• 15 foot patch at the bottom for fruit trees (?)

After 10 minutes of pulling the starter cord on the turfer I found the on-off switch but we won't mention that again. Totally hard work, but the beds were pretty much de-turfed on Saturday, and most of the turf rolled up and moved off the beds on Sunday.

Side View

Giant ! Late sunshine