Work Party

Today was the lottie work party. When I turned, up just before 10am, there were already a number of folks busy with jobs. By the time a got my stuff out of the car all the folks that were going to turn up had turned up. Perfect and I went strimming. We went all the way up the long border and round and about the family beds. I was heartily glad to finish strimming. Swinging a heavy strimmer was hard on my back. It is a dirty job too since the strimmer kicks up dust and the bits of the plants that you have just chopped up and being sweaty it all sticks to you. That's not so bad except when the plants you are smashing up are Nettles and Thistles.

The rest of the folks were split up into two parties, One weeding the patio area and one in the big compost bin[s]. It was odd because the the two parties split along gender lines. No one said anything, it just happened. Ladies weeding, bloke sawing, hammering and shovelling.

The Patio area has a lot of grass growing through the flowers. The four ladies toiled in the sun to clear all the grass and other assorted weeds. It looks really good, sort of refreshed. The blokes tackled to big poo corral, that was. It is now the community compost heap. Sagely Steve and Dave P set about creating bins within the bigger corral using the ubiquitous pallet. They built three down the right hand side and tipped in the worst of the cuttings and leavings that were on the left of the big corral into the newly made smaller bins. The ladies provided another five barrow loads of weed for the new bins. As the compo bin was turned over we came down on the old cuttings etc which had rotted down. It had made a fair compost. Sagely decided that it should all be clear out and dumped on the long border. That we did, seeing as it was a good idea. Ash, me and Dave P, helped and hindered in equal measure by Haz [Harry - son of Dave P], shovelled and barrowed twenty odd loads of fresh compost onto the long border to clear the area.

Haz in the assisting mode. Not quite fair but a good picture.

Whist we toiled Perfect and Sagely tidied up and repaired the compo bins on the reverse side of the big corral. When we finished clearing the big bin Ash and Sagely set about the pallets with a blunt saw to prepare them from tying together to make another three smaller compo bins on the left of the corral. The community compo are now has nine compo bins. The area looks good because it is tidy but also because the new pallets are still bright pine. Sagely, despite himself, ended up with a fairly square and regular shaped job and that makes it look good too.


We got finished a little after noon. The sun had been beating down all morning but at least there was a gentle breeze to cool us down. We surveyed our own and the other teams work and pronounced ourselves happy with the jobs we had done. We took a team photo.



The team are stood on the patios and you can see soil around the plants in the foreground. If you look to the left of shot, on the far side of the roadway you can see the border all mown. Many hands do make light work but more to the point, they make a lot of work and that has a visual impact.