Pig Sty Avenue

Done, now, with yesterday's flooded allotment blues . Here's what a bit of thought and a good night's sleep suggests: a lot of the spoil I've got, (from the pond and under the path) is either heavy clay soil (path), or actual boulder clay from the pond excavations. I'm going to use that as the first line of defence along the NW boundary, build up a wee bank with it. I'll need at least part of the path relaid first, and the scaffold boards I've been garnering, so I can get about with the barrow on the waterlogged ground. The Predecessor had a bank there, with some success. But here's the best bit: when I was talking to the bee-lady at the allotments, she was very interested to hear of my hedgerow plans, and told me the allotments had a huge amount of willow whips... So I'll plant out the clay bank with willow, which will hold the fort this year and next whilst the hawthorn and alder are growing. In the longer term, the combination of clay and hedg...

Facing North Probably, it's not as bad as it looks. Though it did look pretty depressing this morning. I went first thing, because last night's weather forecast suggested there'd be a break in the rain. They were out by a few hours, it actually stopped raining, and the sun even came out, around noon. And so I didn't do what I'd planned, which was to carry on relaying the path for a couple of hours, (the path being that wee canal running down the middle of the photo). You can see the NW bed is waterlogged now, too. Bloody hell. And below, that's looking South. Pond at maximum extent. On the plus side, if you follow the canal up the middle of the photo, you can see where I managed to get a start on relaying the path at the weekend, even though it's veering off slightly West. So it was all a bit depressing, compounded by the lack of endorphins I usually get after a couple of hours hard labour, lost to the flooding and the ceaseless downpour. But, you ...

See, this is one reason, on top of climate change, why we get flooding in Britain. Too much bloody paving, not enough well cultivated land, hedgerows, and trees. This is the view from google earth. This image is before my time, I'm guessing it was taken a couple of years ago. That's my plot edged in green. To the left is the raised beds area. You can see by its proportions that it's two plots joined together. A large part of it is paved, (that near circular area in the middle, and the paths between the beds, and that area in its bottom right corner. The red arrow shows the direction of the slope. It's a gentle slope, probably a couple of feet from the bottom left to the top right in the photo. But the thing is, almost all of the rain that falls on that area, about 5400sq ft, just trickles slowly over the paving (and the impacted grass areas), and into my plot.  I don't know when the two plots were paved over, and presumably nobody thought about the effec...