Φ beds

After getting the most awesome Freecycle donation I'm ever likely to get, I've started to get the garden moving.


I got TWENTY TWO bags of manure. Mostly chicken manure, some cow manure too. Also got a small bag of rabbit bedding from another freecycler but nowhere near enough to satisfy the mass of chicken poop that I have. Hopefully I'll figure that out.

So I decided to put more dorky ideas into the garden. I've seperated the raised bed into sections that have the golden ratio inherent to their scale. Like so:



The raised bed isn't to the correct scale so there will be a strip down it's length cut off, with the rest of the bed sectioned as described. Like so:



I think it will look attractive. Anyway, while I was typing all that I had a very nice idea: to raise each section of the raised bed in accordance with its position in the spiral. Like so:


Ah MS Paint, what can't you do? In this sketch, even the height of each section has a relationship to phi, so it all follows the pattern. Well, I don't have the materials or the time to build this right now so it'll have to wait. But now that I've drawn this, I really want it bad. It looks great!

New Gutter

The wind was pretty insane yesterday. It killed my water bottle guttering. I posted on Freecycle this morning for some guttering or a length of pipe. I got a response within 10 minutes. Someone in Northfield had a 2-metre long pipe. I went to pick it up, hitched it to my bike and cycled home. Bicycles are good.

I used a jigsaw to cut the pipe, the opening I made to 2 radians. Everything else was rope work. This new pipe works far better than the Evian bottles.


The gutter is attached to the shed with trucker's hitches. Also, I tethered the gutter to the compost heap with another trucker's hitch just in case the winds come back. I tethered the filter frame to the barrel with some hitches.

Aberdeen Freecycle

If you're not aware of Freecycle then you should be. How it works: You have some junk you need to get rid of. You would prefer to give it to someone who can use it instead of dumping it in a landfill. Freecycle is the answer. You post your item there and make it available. You help people, you help yourself.

Similarly, you can check the postings on Freecycle for stuff you can use. It saves you money and you help someone get rid of their stuff.

The combination of frugality and community are definitely in step with the Urban Homesteading ethos. If you haven't already, check it out.

Recently I was living in the US. We Freecycled some stuff around the house and just an hour after we posted, our items had been picked up from the driveway. If we saw something we wanted on Freecycle, we had to act fast. People in that city were avid Freecyclers. Aberdeen should be like that.

The biggest problem with Aberdeen Freecycle is that not enough people are on board. Items posted are in areas often far out of the city centre and if you don't have transport you're out of luck.

You can pretty much Freecycle anything. So if you're in Aberdeen, get Freecycling!

The Aberdeen Freecycle page.