Clearing up and growing

From the moment you stepped off the small deck at the front of the house we were greeted by an old burn pile. 

The burn pile was where the last people to live here has collected a big pile of crap they didn't want and thought that setting it on fire would get rid of it. Unlike at Vindolanda where the weather stopped the fire from doing it's job and created some great preservation, here stuff didn't burn because... well microwaves don't burn very well.

So I started to clear it out, now I originally started it to just get the eyesore out of the way and make it a bit safer for the kids. But coming back from the woods one day when it was actually cold and I wasn't being eaten alive by the insects, we come out to see the bee uncle with an old tractor tilling a strip on land over.

Now I was confused and went to the father in law to see what was happening. Turned out, in passing, the wife had mentioned my plan of turning the old burn pile area into our Vegetables garden. So they were here making the first garden strip. 

So once the ground was tilled, and broken up ready for planting I set to work digging with the shovel to make the raised rows, my wife was very surprised I knew how to do this. I'm not sure what shocked her though, I mean, I was trained as an archaeologist at University, I know my way around a shovel, I grew up on Norfolk, a farming county in the UK, put the two together and it's not a huge leap that I'd know how to make a row in a garden. But impressed she was.

So the first planting began, onion bulbs, cabbage, red cabbage and potatoes. Time to start growing.