Farm hands

We had two missions last night: One to lift some heavy stuff from one side of Stepney City Farm to the other, and another to hoe a plot of land up in E10 on the Low Hall Farm Allotments.Milton (above) asked us to help on his allotment plot where he teaches horticulture to kids from local schools.  The plot was thoroughly grassed over.  It was a good 35min run to the allotments which took in 6.34km of Victoria Park, Chatsworth Road, the nice ice rink and riding stables of Lea Bridge Road.  We arrived on the spectacular industrial state in E10 but were not ready for the site of the Idyllic Low Hall Farm Allotments and their olive tree and grape vines sitting in the evening sunshine in front of the limestone spire of St Saviour's Church.Milton put on some nice rock-steady from his car and taught us good hoeing technique and flexed his risk-assessment skills.  Pretty soon the lot of us were hoeing away at the stubborn grassy patch.Hoeing is really hard work.  Particulary for the shoulders.  We aimed o clear a 20ft by 20ft patch in 45 minutes.  We were hard pushed to get it done.With all of us working as quickly as we could, guided by Milton's expert horticultural knowledge we got the patch looking pretty spic and span by our alloted time.We left after our footage and Milton kindly showered us with praise. On the way back we found this shoe.It was another 6.1km on the way back so we'd covered about 12.5 km by the time we got back to Arch Gallery.  There was time for a 50m sprint back to the door  before we collapsed into stretches.Here's a picture of Milton doing some serious hoeing:The Stepney City Farm crew, headed South out of the Arch Gallery led by Harriet.  We ran through Bethnal Green park and pick our way through the streets, crossing Mile End Road and down to the farm on Stepney Way.Katharine, from the farm, explained the two jobs that needed completing.  There was a patch of land to dig up to create an outdoor seedbed, which also needed compost adding to make it nice and nutritious for the new veg.  And over in the chicken enclosure a pile of rubble was messing with gallinaceous feng shui - it needed shifting to another part of the site.One group got straight into digging up the new seedbed, while the rest headed to the other side of the farm with large sacks for the rubble and wheel barrows to collect compost.Various different methods were used to maximise the efficiency of the compost digging; filling a barrow each, filling one barrow between all of the diggers with one person changing the barrows, some loosening compost while others shovelled...While the barrowloads of compost were being ferried to the new seedbed, another group lifted the immensely heavy rubble chunks out of the chickens' enclosure and over to a storage area.  The huge pile took the whole 40 mins to move with at least three people at any one time working on it at full speed.Once the rubble was gone and the seedbed enriched and ready for planting, we said a quick hello to some insanely cute ducklings, goodbye to Katharine and sped back to the Arch gallery.