Before, during and after the rain II - digging up lawn

This is the second post in a mini-series titled Before, during and after the rain. As I wrote in a previous post (see An inconvenient truth... and tomatoes) we have been fighting the clay soil, and particularly found it hard to accept the hardness of the soil for digging up lawn, and creating flower beds and vegetable patches. This is what this post will focus on.

The intermittent rain was quite useful in the manner of making digging a bit easier. In fact on a number of occassions the digging was punctuated by the rain, and when we got back to the patch where we had been digging earlier (or the previous day), it felt easier to get digging there again.

The two veg beds to the left are in the so-called "orchard bit" of our garden, and the one to the left is probably 3 metres long and 110cm wide, the one closer to the big tree (our massively pruned cooking apple) is "only" 2 metres long and 110cm wide. You can spot a little bit that the HG has put some of the manure into these beds, and worked it into the soil. 

For a comparison see the view from the site where the greenhouse now stands down to these two veg beds and the "recently"-planted cherry tree; it also gives a bit of any how much we cut this cooking apple tree. The bramble bushes (or blackberry fruit bushes) had to taken away to make space for the green house, but we saved quite a lot of them and replanted them elsewhere in the orchard.

Coming up next: sharing the "growth of stuff" in our "active" veg beds...
SG