calculus in the garden

The other day I got a chance to use some calculus for real-world stuff.

So our yard is one of those that floods when it rains. It's clay and it has trough shapes. There is one main trough shape and I thought that I would like to get it filled up with soil. So how much soil would I need?

Well I knew I could solve this with an integral. So I went ahead and assumed the curve of the trough was parabolic. Who knows what it was but this was a fair guess.

I went out and measured the depth of the trough and gauged its length. That gave me my parabolic function. It was something like y=-(13/(36^2))x^2+13. The integral of this multiplied by the trough's length gave me the volume of the trough. So it turns out I need around 122 cubic feet of soil.

Turns out that costs somewhere around $200-$500. So looks like I'm keeping the trough. :D

Hidden Bricks

I was digging around in the yard, and noticed brickwork underneath the weeds just outside the back door. Poking around a bit more, noticed that there was a whole brick path out there. So a couple of hours later, with my trusty pitchfork and sweeping brush, I got it to look like this:

So that's pretty cool.

For comparison, this is how it looked before:

O_O

New Compost Pile

Here are some pics of the first compost pile in my garden. Just dumped 3 bags of mowed lawn into it and already it's steaming and rife with happy bacteria :D

Decided that I'm going to have to build a ton more piles to get the amount of compost I need to initialise my garden. Looks like my current garden project is compost batching.

So many people in Conway put their lawn waste out like trash. NOBODY composts! Which is awesome for me :D

Korgan's Garden

Finally! We moved house, and I have my very own yard. It was full of long grass and weeds when we moved in a couple of weeks ago. Today, I finally got my hands on a strimmer and attacked that.

Then I put posts in the ground to mark areas and tied ropes to them. Then, we went and got pallets. I tied them together for a quick compost bin. Here are some progress pics and the plan I sketched up.

I'll be updating regularly with progress pics.

3rd-Gen Basil

We've been saving the seeds of our basil plant for about 2 or 3 years now. The plant we have now is the grandchild of our first plant. It looks like the most amazing basil plant I've ever seen. It's so vibrant, strong, tasty, attractive. And it has just flowered, so we can keep this line forever.

Save your seeds people! If you grow anything and you're not saving seed, you're an idiot.

Rope and Leaky Watering Can

Found out my watering can leaks, a month ago or so. Took advantage of this: tied up the can above our basil pot and now it has a drip feeder.

Note: This isn't a perfect solution. It wets the leaves which is almost never a good thing, but it's been hot outside so I have no concern about mould growth. Other than that it's great and it's nice to be able to quickly fill up the can and walk away letting it get on with it. And it's nice to use rope. And it looks unusual.

Rope is attached to bars with an Evenk Hitch, can is pulled up with a Trucker's Hitch (with a #1058 loop), finished off with wraps. I usually never use wraps because they're such a hassle to undo even though they look good, but I can get away with it this time because I'm using the Evenk: if I need to take this down I just pull on the end.

How the raised bed in Aberdeen is now

I left Aberdeen in February and, with it, left my raised bed behind. You can see it in this blog. My mother has been taking care of it since then.

This is it six months later:



Potatoes growing out of the compost pile :)

The health in these plants is unbelievable. This would simply not have been possible before I started building the soil two years ago. The soil was sandy and lifeless. Now this.

Build your soil! First and foremost!