Sheeting the Pit

Here's what I've learned:
1. It's sheeting the pit not pitting the sheet (but try telling my brain that). 
2. Apparently it was really easy this year (but try telling my body that). 

For a few weeks now I've been hearing rumours that I would be involved in sheeting the pit this year. Like many things in life, I didn't give the reality much thought (I once agreed to walk 500 miles across Spain in my summer holidays without thinking about what that actually meant. Luckily it turned out to be amazing, despite being proposed to by an Australian and an Austrian. But that's another story). 

Somewhere in Spain, 1994

Last Thursday after tea, I was instructed to don my boilersuit, leggings and wellies and join the Wacky Races to the silage pit. I ended up as a hanger-on on the loadall after turning down a lift on the quad (I didn't think Ivie's brother and nephew would appreciate me clinging to them the way I do to Ivie) and in the loadbed of the pick-up (I didn't want to embarrass myself in front of Ivie's sister-in-law, niece and two of her friends by tripping on the way in and on the way out). 

Another member of the team was already up the hill (via tractor) so that was us up to nine. 

This is how the pit looked by the time we'd finished. 

It looks that way for five or six months of the year. 

I've walked past it often in the last couple of years. 

I've never once contemplated how it gets like that. 

For the uninitiated, the pit consists of three concrete sides and an open front. It is filled with cut grass then covered in two layers of plastic, a layer of green mesh and weighted down with tyres. 

BUT the layers of plastic aren't just two single massive sheets. Because that would be too easy - and too difficult (imagine trying to transport a bin bag that size). So, there are side sheets that are rolled in from the sides then the main sheets are rolled down in sections and weighted down at the seams with tyres. I didn't quite grasp which sheets go under and which go over but Ivie seemed to have it under control. At one point, I was sure we were folding French seams Patrick and Esme would be proud of. 

Socially distant teamwork

This was us rolling down the last sheet. By this point, I was sweaty, out of breath and had aching muscles. And we hadn't even started chucking tyres around yet. It was a rude awakening from my 14 weeks of shielding where I haven't ventured off the farm. Apart from a fantastic online Pilates class (thank you, Di), there hasn't been a huge amount of lockdown exercise. That certainly changed last Thursday...

I probably did a bit less than everyone else, partly because I was always one step behind, standing on the wrong sheet or putting a tyre in the wrong place. Frequently all three. But it was one of those occasions I'd have been sad to miss (but don't remind anyone I said so this time next year). It felt like I was making a contribution, however small and unskilled, to the people and place I call home.