Little daisy

Today I spent the day intermittently digging out wall fill.....

Last year after we had spread mulch neatly and set up a nice compost bin up, after several days of heavy rain a large section of garden wall collapsed and covered the area we had just worked on with a tonne of stones, and sticky mud from the centre of the wall. The mason rebuilt the wall with mostly new stones and didn't pack the centre with earth, so when they had finished we had a lot of stones left over and a sizeable pile of wall filling. Today I dug most of it up and moved, separated the stones out and moved it.

The wall filling was made out of what I assume was river mud and sand from what would have been the marsh at the bottom of the street which is now where the hospital has been built. It has spent nearly two centuries sitting in the wall until it burst out last autumn crushing our compost bin to death... It was a mixture of fine sand and alluvial silt, and stones of all shapes and sizes. When it went in it was probably quite salty, but over the years that may have been washed out of it, I don't know. It has a strange texture, it's a bit sticky like clay, but it was easy to dig and rake, had zero organic matter in it, and was full of stones of all shapes and sizes...

The rain kept coming and going so I nipped in and out to avoid it and make a fresh brew every now and then. We now have a pile of walk filling earth somewhere else in the garden and two piles of dirty stones - which with a bit of rain will clean up I'm sure...

Before dinner I took the camera into the garden and too a picture of this daisy, which avoided the chop last time the lawn was mowed.