When September Ends

Summer having come, but not yet passed here, it has been an exceptionally dry September.  This v good from PoV countryside labourers.

For where site wardens have shaved the ground with their brush cutters, workers tooled up with fork and rake have to come after and remove all that spent vegetation.  They look ever so much happier during the briefing if they know the cuttings will be dry, therefore lighter to handle. 

Part of today’s task was raking again: this time not dead wildflowers from a water-meadow, but dead reeds from an Anglo-Saxon drainage ditch.  Fortunately, across the UK it has been the driest September since the Met Office started keeping rainfall records in 1910.  There did not appear to be any Green-Gymmers thinking, either literally or metaphorically, “Wake me up when September ends” as they rounded up reluctant reeds, and moved them to the compost heap:

Some volunteers opted for transporting by tarpaulin.  Others, myself included, preferred to persist with pitchforks, despite the reluctance of reeds to allow themselves to be intertwined into a bundle which may be easily picked up.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the public footpath, there was a more modern channel to be dug out, where it had become overgrown and silted up:

Before

After

Thankfully, this is only an annual maintenance job.  That it makes for a hard work-out, I can testify from having switched position from pitchforker to shoveler for the last leg of the morning’s session, to ensure the job got finished. 

The only complaint I heard during the morning was the heat of the sun on the back of the neck.  IMHO that is a nice problem to have.  Certainly preferable to cold rain trickling down the inside of one’s collar!  Depending on one’s viewpoint, also preferable to being stuck indoors and not able to enjoy the feel of sunshine on skin at all.