My father has decided to clear an area that hasn't been touched for around 30 years to create a space for the new vegetable patch. It's a South East facing patch, full of young trees and packed with brambles. What was amazing was the the amount of land we could clear in relatively little time. We chopped back a number of quickthorn, holly and ash trees around the edge to let more light in to the area and took out a number of selfseeded buddleia which were a good 15 ft high. The great thing about buddleia is that it is very shallow rooted so, when removing it you really only need keep enough of the main trunk to act as a handle above ground and use that to leverage out the roots.
Cutting back trees, pulling up brambles and building bonfire after bonfire was a cleansing and fulfilling job, coming as it did in the middle of a highly stressed week at work. Getting covered in dirt, and pricked by thorns as part of achieving something was a welcome change to the far dirtier business of office politics and management targets.
Although there is much still to do, we left it a mostly cleared space, the amount of brambles and trees meant that there was very little else to take out and it was a simple job to rake the area clear. The soil underneath is deep and loamy, made up of the leafmould of a hundred years of Autumns, never before disturbed. It will be exciting in spring to see what bulbs emerge from many years of hibernation.
I look forward to getting back down there soon to help in putting the beds and then getting the garden growing.
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