Tuesday was a wonderful day!!! We headed down to Cockenzie and Port Seton to their community garden to help them out by pruning some wildly overgrown shrubs, at least that was the idea. Once we had reached the site we were advised that our main task was to dig out some grass-like substance which had invaded and taken over the site.
We were also asked to spread out red-chips and bark chip over different sections of the garden to top-up what was there before. Dave Reed wins the prize for getting through the most of the obnoxious invader and sending it packing into some rather frail black bags we had been supplied with. Tobias and Thomas spread out the bark chip when it arrived and Derek got stuck into the red-chips, while David Kate Neil and Rob moved their way to the back of the garden. We didn’t exactly transform the site from dilapidated rundown wilderness into a lush and orderly pleasure garden sparkling with varied hues of green but we made a big difference and left an extremely satisfied customer standing in the road and in the rain waving us off on our homeward journey. HIghlight of the day was definitely stuffing ourselves with chocolate brownies, lemon drizzle cake and strawberries at lunch time and washing these home baked delights down with several cups of quality tea and coffee……..
Wednesday saw us heading out east along the A1 to Butterdean Woods to install some volunteer-fashioned log edging into muddy sections of the path through the woods past the road. The morning was spent painstakingly slicing and dicing bits of fallen trees into passable log-edging and pins to hold it in place. The afternoon saw the group splitting up with myself going to slog it out in the drainage ditch on the right hand side of the main path along with Dave Adams Tommy and Neasa. This ditch was fairly well blocked up with branches, leaves, weeds and all sorts of nettles so it wasn’t easy work for us and I can imagine that critics of the regime back in Stalinist Russia who had been sent to the Gulags didn’t do work that was much less pleasing.
I wasn’t in on thursday but I have been told that we went to Bridgend Allotments to undertake some construction work, so we were digging out a path and making room for a set of steps. We ll be there for several days yet and are expecting a hardcore delivery next week. That’s Type 1 for the path by the way and not nosebleeding bass pumping cymbal crashing techno from Belgium. Some of the volunteers also helped out with general gardening tasks for the allotment owners 🙂
