{"id":25317,"date":"2020-04-30T11:54:09","date_gmt":"2020-04-30T09:54:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.edimentals.com\/blog\/?p=25317"},"modified":"2020-05-02T10:53:53","modified_gmt":"2020-05-02T08:53:53","slug":"birthday-excavations","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.edimentals.com\/blog\/?p=25317","title":{"rendered":"Birthday excavations"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Many thanks for all the birthday greetings yesterday! 
Last year’s signature tune was When I’m 64 by the Beatles, but this year’s I’ve been looking forward to most. It’s a song recorded by my favourite singer\/ songwriter Vin Garbutt on his album “Tossin’ a Wobbler” from 1978. It goes like this:
“A man of the earth, a man of the soil in his lonely allotment he labours and toils.<\/em>
He’s not much to do since he turned 65.<\/em>
So he took to his garden to keep him alive its his only joy and his pride.<\/em>
Every day as I go through the old shanty town where the sheds and allotments all stand I see the old man of the land with a rake or a spade in his hand.<\/em>
He’s there in all weather in sunshine or rain.”
<\/em>Here’s a live recording: https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=GMrzhLedV1o<\/a>
I even used to sing it (very badly) when I was young to the torment of my family! I recently discovered and bought a documentary about Garbutt (he died in 2017) and was pleasantly surprised to discover that he was a veggie gardener in real life (http:\/\/www.pancrack.tv\/vin.html<\/a>), I spent my birthday doing what I like best…digging…and completing about 30m of trench along the driveway and around the outhouse, the latter to eliminate the tree roots from a new garden area and along the whole length of the driveway, also to keep tree roots out of an area where I still grow annuals. It’s difficult on my shallow soil to get a balance and the trees I planted on my boundary over 30 years ago were taking over. I last dug up the 20-30m of the driveway by hand 34 years ago so that we could drive the car up to the house. I know as I have a picture somewhere of my wife pregnant with Hazel and Robin with a pile of stones. We’ve now gone full circle and we’re carless and the drive is back to being a footpath.
P.S: I’ve also become known as ESM: Extreme Subterranean Man

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…and extending a bed around this birch tree with excess soil:
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http:\/\/www.edimentals.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/04\/Digging.mp4<\/a><\/video><\/div>\n\n\n\n

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Many thanks for all the birthday greetings yesterday! Last year’s signature tune was When I’m 64 by the Beatles, but this year’s I’ve been looking forward to most. It’s […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"cybocfi_hide_featured_image":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[3872],"tags":[3875,3874,3316,3873],"class_list":["post-25317","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-digging","tag-3875","tag-birthday","tag-ditches","tag-vin-garbutt"],"views":2871,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.edimentals.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25317","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.edimentals.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.edimentals.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.edimentals.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.edimentals.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=25317"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"http:\/\/www.edimentals.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25317\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":25423,"href":"http:\/\/www.edimentals.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25317\/revisions\/25423"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.edimentals.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=25317"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.edimentals.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=25317"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.edimentals.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=25317"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}