Am I nearly there yet?
Both the weather and my back have behaved well, and here is the result:
Back lawn nearly finished
I estimate that I can finish the job in two more sessions if the remaining section contains very little rubble. I hit a bad patch of rubble last week, but in my last two sessions there has been almost nothing to get rid of.
I’m quite surprised I managed to make this much progress. At the start, I wasn’t sure whether I would be able to finish the job by mid-September, but I have found that if I do no more than 60 to 90 minutes of digging a day, my back doesn’t mind too much. And with the continued dry weather, the soil has become drier and thus a lighter weight to shift. I have no more turf from the old back lawn to bury in the trenches, but I have been digging up turf from the front lawn to reveal a large cherry tree root which I want to dig out this autumn.