Hot and sunny today and we had a session in the paddock which is beginning to crack up, making it fairly dangerous to play against faster bowling in, so I've had to take some action to repair it and make it usable as a mate of mine is coming over tomorrow and he's going to bowl and bat in it.
So this afternoon I've been back and forth with buckets of water getting the surface wet and soft so that it can be rolled with some of the bigger cracks filled with fresh earth. So having done that and rolled it, it's looking pretty good again ready for tomorrow. The only downer is the fact that some of the football kids who are always looking to ruin our cricket activities in some way, trod all over the newly rolled surface, making pock marks all over it. Luckily they dont have a clue as to what to do in order to cause problems and real damage so their attempts were fairly superficial. It'll be interesting to see how the repairs and rolling hold up, because the work was done in a new way, with the surface being soaked locally along the seamers line and then fresh dry earth being applied in a thin layer over the wet surface. The idea being that once rolled the dry earth will bond with the original surface and become damp. Once that was done an additional light watering was applied to the new surface and rolled beneath a fine mesh to get a really smooth surface. It'll dry over-night, so I wont know if the bonding of the two substrates will work, because they're of two differing soil types, the existing surface is primarily clay with some organic material 95% + 5%, where as the new layer is probably 50/50, so may dry out far quicker and therefor crumble quickly. This is all experimental so we'll just have to see how it goes?
