Freecycle Pickup & Raised Bed Excavation

Today I picked up a shower chair off Freecycle that is the right height for me to be able to get on and off easily on the allotment. 

It's extremely light and will live in the potting shed and will be moved out when I visit. The green plastic garden chairs are too low and with the plastic degrading mark your clothes if you sit on them.

I trimmed around the hinges of the gates again, excavated a plan area in excess of the narrow raised beds 0.9m x 1.2m that I'm going to install either end of the existing 2.4m x 1.2m beds footprint.

Humus soil excavated on plan area larger than the width of the raised bed that will go either end. The soil was weeded and excavated into square flower buckets that are currently stacked behind the shovel in the photograph above.

I placed a section of plastic at the trench edge, then backfilled with three barrowloads of woodchips, levelled and then compacted with the rake. Then watered the woodchips in the excavation to help consolidate the pile.

This brings me back up to ground level, so the cunning plan is to get a plot neighbour or two to help me lift the 2.4m x 1.2m existing bed frame up and unscrew it as I want to use the materials to raise the long narrow beds on the boundary between plots 1 & 1A.

Then place the first new 1.2m x 0.9m raised bed frame on the woodchipped area and line the bottom with magic cardboard then fill it to the top with woodchips

I munched red and yellow raspberries off the plants each time I went out of the allotment into the carpark and returned with woodchips or to turn the water on and off. I feel like a gorilla feeding from my very own food forest this time of year.