As for progress, I'm now finally round the corner and on the home straight. One of the problems I've been having is where to pile up the soil while I dig some more. I've been creating a vertical 'coal face' which I can then take vertical slithers from to the same depth, breaking the compacted clay up in the process. The problem comes with where to clear that to. As you can see, what I create is a slope back to the coal face.
As the left side of the L shape is one railway-sleeper lower, its been creating problems as I dig out more soil than I can put anywhere. Today I came up with using my Draper gardening bag, which has worked perfectly and made things much easier (I wish I'd thought of that a week or two ago, as it would have made working conditions significantly easier and so probably quicker too!).
Tomorrow I'm going to pop out and buy a couple more - they're excellent for this temporary storage, pack flat and have already been useful for other garden tasks as well.
With my soil analysis back, I also went and bought some manure today - both the usual farmyard and poultry varieties. I know I could have probably picked up farmyard manure cheaper - but it's a convenience thing for me at the moment, and with 4-for-3, it really wasn't too expensive :)
My aim now is to get the digging 'hole' to the end of the patch, and then repeat the process backwards, mixing in manure as I go. Now that the clay is broken up I'm hoping it'll be much easier for the second pass. The weather continues to hold (no rain since I fitted the water butt - typical!) but I'm now keen to get it all mixed in before it does rain or the difficulty of the task will increase 10-fold.
So I'd like to get to the end of the first lot of digging by the end of tomorrow and then see how quick the mixing in of manure is - but still a few feet of back-breaking work to go first. Hopefully depositing some more soil in a couple more Draper bags will help.
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