Laying the tarmac, with the recycled (soon-to-be-connected) water tank in the background...

It has been ages since we updated this section of the website - a reflection of how busy all the volunteers have been. So here are a few photos from the past month or so:

One of our garden volunteers test-driving one of the new ramps. Also very popular with children on small green tractors.

The contractors have started and we have all the short tarmac ramps into the green completed - and also the tarmac pad for under the accessible picnic table.

In the next fortnight or so, they will return to do the water supply, raised beds, another pathway, pond, marsh, gate, noticeboard, cycle racks. And then we will have more space to plant around them.

New beds: we are steadily scything, with our new scythe, the old annual meadows as they stop flowering.

Some of them are being turned into narrower annual beds (so we can weed them more easily), an extra path (for accessibility and just because we like them) and permanent (mainly perennial) beds (better for wildlife and people). We have planted one perennial up already, just with plants that needed to be moved, odds and ends and divisions from local gardens.

We have prepared another one as a test-bed for Pictorial Meadows perennial seeded meadows. We hope to get this ready before winter - or next Spring.

Under a narrow bed. We have a thin layer of dry sandy dust (with clumps of grass roots), overlying a thick layer of clinker, sometimes another layer of hardcore (including bricks) and then clay. Delightful.

Narrow beds: we had a test dig-out of the clinker under the narrow beds and decided it was too much work to do 'everywhere'. We will need to breach and remove it for trees but will live with it in most areas. Plants seem to cope with it, sending out roots sideways instead of down.

The one bed we did prepare, we might use for asparagus, which we think might do well in this free sandy draining soil (and could be delicious). We will start some seeds off in 2017.