The Sieving Daylights

Five GG Yorkies met Jo at the Poppleton Community Railway Nursery on a bright and sunny Friday morning. Our task was to dig out some compost from across the road next to the railway station and bring it back over to the nursery behind one of their many buildings. The wheelbarrows and spades were ready and waiting for us. Luckily for us the compost was lovely and soft and therefore very easy to shovel into our wheelbarrows. We carefully crossed the road with our laden barrows, much to the amusement of the waiting cars who were queuing at the level crossing. I'm sure we gave the train passengers something interesting to look at as well.

After a while we had accumulated quite a mound of compost over at the nursery and Jo asked us if we would like to have a go at sieving the compost using their sieving machine and of course we couldn't resist. We took it in turns - one of us was loading one shovel of soil at a time into one end of the machine, one of us used the "plunger" device to push the soil down into the machine, one of us was checking the other end for a build-up of debris that had been sieved out and the other was busy shoveling the fine, sieved compost that was quickly pouring out underneath into spare wheelbarrows. Quite a production line and great fun! The sieved compost has to be put through a steriliser before it can be used and as there was no room in the steriliser this morning, the sieved compost would have to stay in the wheelbarrows for now. Meanwhile, Sean (our wonderful photographer) was busy photographing some visiting robins across the road who had come to investigate our hard work while we were busy at the sieve. In no time at all we had filled all the spare wheelbarrows and put them out of the way so that we could continue with our original task and we went back to collecting the compost from across the road.

After about an hour and a half we called it a day as several of us needed to leave. I'm sure we will be back another Friday to continue our good work as there's plenty to do and a variety of tasks they need help with. Jo thanked us and we headed off, some (Leanne) going to do another mission this afternoon!