On Saturday 27th and Sunday 28th June, Bruce and Adam finished making the box seats which are now inside the shed ready to store things in and for sitting on!

The photo below shows what they look like. The  box seats are made from 80% reclaimed wood, which we were given by a local building site in Petersfield in 2014 and would have  otherwise been thrown away in a skip.

On the 16th and 17th of August I bit the bullet and decided to put in the greenhouse drainage. Many of you will recall that with the rain over the winter we ended up with about an inch of standing water in the Greenhouse and it turned into a mud bath! In an attempt to prevent this happening again Vincent suggested having a ‘French Drain’. This is simply a drainage channel in the floor taking the water outside.

Firstly the paving slabs had to be lifted and stacked and the trench dug to about 8 inches depth.

There has quite a bit of turf and soil to remove!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Next a plastic drainage pipe was layed in the trench, on top of an inch of sand. I had pre-drilled about 60 holes in the pipe so that water will percolate out. I used a mixture of Travis Perkins sand left over from the shed base and some of the ‘free’ sand which was dumped on Waterworks Lane. The end of the pipe has a small ‘Soak away’ made using stones, which gives a big surface area for the water to slowly drain into the soil. The pipe is surrounded by sand so that water will drain out of the pipe and hopefully into the surrounding soil.

 

Inside the shed I dug out the floor to accommodate the end of the pipe. The end of the pipe has a plant pot over the it to stop stones going down the pipe. 

 

 

The pipe is covered with sand ready for the turf to go on top and new sand was used for relaying the paving slabs.

 

Finally the paving slabs were relayed about an inch higher than before so that they are flush with the lip of the door to stop people tripping over. There is still some work to do finishing the drainage inside the greenhouse and eventually I plan to pave the floor to make it flat.

This weekend we will be starting to cut the grass next to the fence ready to plant our hedge. As usually there will be someone at the garden from about 1.30pm

Hi Everyone

 

I have added Camilla’s and my original equipment lists together to avoid further duplication.

You can access this if you click on the Goodlife Community Garden tab on the top left corner of the web page and select ‘dashboard’ in the drop down menu.

Once you are in the dashboard click on media and this will bring up all the files which have been uploaded to the blog.

Any problems let me know

Adam