First roll of the season in the Paddock

Here in Jacob Rees Moggs Little England the Weather continues to be pretty rubbish with a forecast of potentially more snow. But in the lull today after a couple of dry-ish days, with the threat that the ground might soon dry out too much, I went over to the paddock and did some work. In the last post I'd raked the moss off and in the meantime the weather hasn't been conducive for any kind of recovery of the grass, so it looked pretty muddy and rough. The priority though for us is just to get it pretty flat for the most part and then in the next couple of weeks top dress it and plant new seed. The other thing I wanted to do was fill in the tread holes at the bowlers end ready to be rolled and seeded.

Here's the situation at the start of the work...

From the other end...

Over the years we've cut a full strip in the paddock prior to the council taking down the perimeter fences, but the last couple of years we've just worked on one end so that we can bowl and bat. You can see in the middle there are marks where people get in the space and do doughnuts on motorbikes, thankfully this is a rare occurrence. In fact more damage is done if the council cut the grass when it's too wet using their sit on type tractor 'Flymo' lawnmower.

Today, I marked out where the stumps will be set and then rolled the surface either side of an imaginary line between the stumps with more space on the off-side. 

Above the foot-marks filled.


The playing area after the rolling, it's never going to be Lords, but it'll do us for a bit of practice just outside our backdoor.

 View from the side.

Looking at the weather forecast, it's predicted to get down to -3 or 4 degrees by this coming Tuesday and Wednesday with the chance of some snow. Once that's gone, I'm going to have to assume that as we're nearly into April I can get some top-dressing on it - a mixture of clay and compost. Try and get the surface more even and then seed and feed it and leave it to see how it goes. You can bet we'll then have bloody heatwave and no rain or the council will drive all over with their mower and tear it all up!