Ditch Diggers United

I confess to huge gaps between blogs this winter, but cricket's a summer sort so not a lot has been happening... Wrong! There's been a massive amount of work taking place over the last few months - but most of it has been on one topic which probably isn't the most exciting. But as we're only 8 weeks off the start of the new season it's probably time for a quick update.

As regulars will be aware, last winter saw the pitch suffer terribly due to the wet weather. In fact, from December through to the last week in March most of it was underwater, to a depth of 25cm in places. This is not healthy for the ground or the grass, and at the end of the season we hoped for a better winter this year. Alas, the first week of October saw it flooded again with the first autumn storm. Something had to be done!

And so started a steadily expanding set of works. Initially we thought to dig a small sump-pit at the lowest point - but quickly discovered the water table was only a couple of inches below the surface. finding and digging a couple of investigative trenches over known drains determined they were completely blocked with silt and clay - probably a result of the Boxing Day floods of 2015.

This led us to dig further trenches to clear some of these drains, plus the excavation of two new drainage channels - from the square to the boundary, and from the boundary to a working drain. Along the way we unearthed an old culvert deeper still - again blocked. With considerable effort this has been cleared now. New piping and 16 tons of gravel have been added to the new drainage trenches and all the soil replaced. The ground has dried out considerably and the water table is now about 24 inches down rather than 2!

All of this work has taken 5 months with a (very) small team of workers, but it should leave us in a much better place for the next few years - regular maintenance is required obviously but we now know where the drains are and have access to most of them.

Told you it wasn't exciting - but it was important!

Now, other stuff. As mentioned there's only 8 weeks until the new season starts. So it's time to begin the prep work. The players are hard at work in winter training and turnout has been good at nets. Plans are in place to paint the clubhouse and make it all pretty for the start of the season. And on April 6th we're holding a range of activities - starting with a work party to paint the fences, tidy the ground, put up the trampoline and sight screens, clean the clubhouse and changing rooms, etc. This will be followed by the traditional Grand National event complete with sweepstake and seeing which loser Steve backs. Then a full blown race night of our own to take us into the early hours!

Summer's coming - let's start early!