A bit of extreme gardening

[H] Helen's parents have been visiting for a few days. Normally they come for a holiday and do lots of walking, this time they were here for three full-on days of hard graft, helping us with what we call 'extreme gardening'. Having created a suitable area for our holding bed/veg plot, the task this week was to fill it with soil. Now we could just go out and buy several tonnes of topsoil but there wouldn't be any fun in that! And we have got quite a lot of soil in the garden already, it's just full of stones and rocks such that it's impossible to get a shovel into the ground. So in comes Kubi, our trusty digger. Add to that an old garden railing, a couple of scaffolding planks, some rope and a wooden board and you have a giant sieving machine.

Kubi digs out the ground, gently empties it at the top of the chute and, as it rolls down, the soil falls through the holes into the strategically placed wheelbarrow and all the rocks and rubble end up at the bottom on the wooden board. Then you just need some man (and woman!) power to barrow the soil away to the veg plot area and shovel up the rocks into another wheelbarrow and dump that somewhere else. It took a bit of head scratching and some trial runs to perfect the set-up but we soon got a good system going mainly thanks to Helen's mum who seemed to come up with all the good ideas and solutions to teething problems. It also required some fairly precise manoeuvring of the digger as one false move of the arm could (and did!) easily dismantle our slightly precarious sieve. But Malcolm quickly got the hang of it and we were flying by the end of the first day. It was hot, dusty and hard work and we must have processed several tonnes of earth, but we now have an area approximately 7m x 4m of beautifully sieved soil, deep enough for eventually growing potatoes, parsnips, carrots, etc. Couldn't have done it without the extra workforce - thanks Mum & Dad!

Watch our giant sieving machine in action: