Having signed up for some path building delights, some of us were slightly surprised to see we had sneakily been reassigned to more soil sifting 😉. However the weather had other ideas and turned the already clay and clod heavy soil into a mud bath, so our task was hastily reassigned to ditch digging to release some of the new and unwanted ponds.

While Louise and Jackie busied themselves raking any remaining good soil into the grass as originally planned, most of the rest of us started attempting to widen the ditch Roger had started, to hopefully get it flowing into the next door allotments. Unfortunately this involved digging under and around a barbed wire fence, brushwood, trees and the aforementioned giant pile of mud/soil.

We set to it as best we could, rapidly damming the current channel so we could dig more easily and hacking away from various angles while we slowly sank into the clay and fixed ourselves (or at least our trainers) in place. After clearing the brush, Lucy and new boy Jon went round to the other side and started digging there, at increasingly awkward angles (Lucy: "this feels like when they send the smallest child up the chimney to sweep"). Debs, Pete and myself got stuck in (literally) on the wet side, to the point of hands and knees for Debs, while Max "don't want to dirty my best trainers" supervised from a safe distance.

Eventually, after a brief baby rat incident, Michal came over to tell us our time was up, but then got dragged in and continued the digging! The final core team couldn't be dragged away by any enticements of dinnertime or dry feet and eventually victory was theirs, and they all plodded off home on their new clay platform shoes 🙂