Plate Bigger then Belly

I had a moment of despair at the plot today. Ridiculous really, because nothing has gone wrong. I just felt very lonely all of a sudden, trying to work out what to do about the bloody couch grass on a patch I'm working on, and the idea that I had about digging it over and burying it on itself, which isn't working. It isn't working because the clay is so compacted that to even get a third of  spade's depth down feels impossible. When I do manage to lift some out, I am rewarded by weedbound soil, thick ropes of bramble root criss-crossing underneath the surface. I hope it's bramble. It could be some sort of alien species. There's also some thick white roots that go on forever, but I am less worried about those, in comparison with the bramble, they're nothing.To compound matters, I had been looking at the bed where I'm going to put my potatoes, and it's gone back to being like the surface of the moon. Even hitting the boulders of clay with a lump hammer had no effect (I'm not suggesting that should be a remedy, I'm just saying).

Bloody couchgrass. Bloody crappy soil.

I am more interested in the concept of no-dig gardening than anything else, partially because of the quality of the soil, partially because lazy. I'd like to fill the plot with raised beds in an ideal world, but the cost of filling with soil/manure is out of my budget, but reading the no-dig technique, I'm still going to have to acquire a lot of organic matter. I know that I can do it a bed at a time, but even if I wanted enough to do one bed, I'd still need more than I could get in the boot of someone's car. I'm going to contact the bloke who advertises on the allotment gate and find out what his prices are, I think, and whether he'll get the stuff onto my plot, which is a big consideration. Lots of topsoil/manure people seem keen to underline that theirs is a kerbside service. No good for me.
Anyway, even if I have to do it inch by tiny inch, I will get there eventually - there isn't a deadline, after all. And I need to keep thinking about how much I have achieved. Three weeks ago, there was nothing at all on the site except for a lot of black plastic, some bags of soil and a lot of planks. There are still a lot of planks, true. But I do have beds now. And, if today's peek
 under the fleece means anything at all, I do apparently have something growing from seed in the roots bed. Which is something.
So I still haven't finished the bloody pea-cage. That's alright though. I can't have guilt about stuff I don't even need yet. The potatoes are in the kitchen waiting to be chitted, ready to go in the crappy clay. I have parsnips and more spinach to pot on, and my chillies are coming up. Good really. Good.