Golden week 2020

Almost a whole week off, and nowhere to go because of the corona lockdown. So I took the opportunity and rented a backhoe for 2 days to dig the plot and save my lungs from some of the dust and dirt by not digging manually.
This time the backhoe I got was real real new. On the hour meter it said 70 hours. Wow. Completely different from the piece of crap rusty thing I got last time.

Ain't it pretty?

First off I shoved all the pieces of bamboo lying around to one side so I could get around easier. Then I widened the east side trench. Then it was lunch time.
After that I went on to dig out roots on a 7 meters wide area on the north. So basically after I was done, I had dug out roots from 25% of the plot's whole area.

It is starting to look like a war zone

The plot, after the second hoe attack, from above

While digging with the hoe, I found a couple of snakes which I carefully helped to the side of the digging site so they could go hunt frogs or whatever.
After returning the backhoe, I took a day's rest. Now the roots were all dug out, but not removed, so they were just mixed with the heaps of soil, and needed to be removed by hand. I don't have a tractor and fork, and some of the root pieces are small (10-20 cm) so manually removing them is pretty much my only option if I want a clean plot.

Just started to manually remove roots

So after the rest, I went in with a shovel and little by little took out roots and cleaned the soil, starting from east.

30 more meters to go...

After a day (well 3 hours really, but it is my limit of cleaning roots by hand in the summer heat), these pictures above show how much I had achieved.

Here is where I put the roots I found

The big roots I just put farther south, so they can dry in the sun and so that I can shake out all the soil that is stuck to them. The long roots I throw along the north wall, north of the wall. I figured that is only right because that is where they originated.