Gimme Shelter
There’s been a plan for a while by the Gloucestershire Wildlife Trust to erect a shelter in the top corner of the orchard. Three of us today started on that task. We had a plan of the design, some timber had been delivered and the aim today was to put up six upright poles which form the base structure.
We met at 10am and luckily the rain stopped and the rest of the day was blue sky. We started out by measuring the floor of where it would go, using pegs in the ground and string to guide us.
I’m very happy to report that we used Pythagoras’s Theorem to ensure the angles were 90 degrees and the plan was exactly rectangular.
Pete decided to enlarge the design slightly before we started digging, so a quick recalc got the new layout square again. Better to do this now than after the holes were dug.
The ground was unexpectedly very rough in this area of the orchard. Just a few centimeters below the grass line was significant brick rubble, followed by naturally occuring stone and the remnants of ancient field drains. It was slow progress.
My hole was in the far corner and would be the deepest. It was one meter, which is very laborious to dig out. A normal spade is okay for the first 30cm or so, but it then became a blend of a hole spade, normal spade and a heavy stave shaped like a chisel. It took a good 2.5 hours to dig, with smaller and smaller amounts being scooped out the further we went down.
We didn’t progress as far as we hoped. There were quite a few corrections to the paper design as we went and we had to make adjustments to the build order as we went. There’s the normal work party tomorrow scheduled to be at the orchard again, so I may continue if my arm is rested overnight.
