Having taken the sides off the old strawberry bed, the problem remained of what to do with the soil it contained — probably about half a tonne. The bed was next to a concrete pad with a dwarf wall of concrete blocks around it. I think it used to be the base for a large dog kennel. I put an old garden table on the pad and used to use it for standing plants on, but the table succumbed to terminal rot and is now on the bonfire.
I decided that life would be much easier from the point of view of maintaining the veggie plot and accessing the compost area with the tractor if I got rid of the pad altogether. I almost wish I hadn’t 😀
The blocks forming the dwarf wall were buried about a third of their height in the ground. I had to dig around the outside of many of them so I could dislodge them, and being old “proper” concrete blocks, they were very heavy. Eventually I had removed enough of them to discover that the pad was concrete laid on brick rubble and about 5″/125mm deep. I couldn’t break it with a sledgehammer as it was.
Eventually I noticed a crack in the pad and managed to free a corner and drag it away. That spurred me on to see if I could somehow break some more. I ended up with a couple of very large pieces that I used the digger to lift by the edge and lay back down on top of some of the removed blocks. That allowed the sledgehammer to be used to rather better effect and after much effort I managed to break the rest into pieces I could pick up.
After clearing the area I started to drag the soil from the bed back over the top of the hole I’d made, at which point I found absolutely loads of bindweed. I did my best to get it out. I reckon I had several kilos of roots by the end of it.
That done, a little “smoothing” of the soil and in a few weeks no-one will ever know there was ever anything there…
