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

FAST CRUDE SOIL TEST

Today I did a whole bunch of crap. One of those things was a fast, crude soil test on a box of soil I dug up in a nearby abandoned plot of land. I did two tests with it: I did a quality test and I did a pH test.

THE QUALITY TEST
The quality test measures the proportion of different materials in the soil sample. If you mix a bunch of soil with water in a glass jar, stir it up and let it settle, it will settle into layers of different materials. You can then measure the height of each layer to figure the proportion of the materials in the soil. Here's a sketch to explain:



So I did this, and left the jar sit all day, and I got this:



As you can see, it's pretty much a jar of clay and water. Not the best for planting in but awesome if I want to make pottery and bake it in the sun.

THE PH TEST:
The second test I did was a pH test. I'm well aware that you can measure pH electronically or with litmus strips, but this is my fast, unrefined method:

• Take a small soil sample.
  
• Split it evenly into two small containers.
  
• Add water to one sample, enough to just cover it.
  
• In the sample with water, add a small amount of sodium bicarbonate (baking soda).
  
• If it creates small bubbles, the soil sample is acidic.
  
• If not, add vinegar to the other sample.
  
• If it creates small bubbles, the soil sample is alkali.
  

I did this test once before and the baking soda sample fizzed, confirming it was acidic soil. I did the same test with this soil sample and got no fizzing in either case, which indicates that the soil is pretty neutral.

Despite the field being full of neutral clay, there's an asston of wild plants growing there, as should be expected. I took photographs of every plant I could find there, came home and tried to identify them all, and then grouped them into their respective families. It's all very interesting and that will be my next blog.

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!

PALLETS AT LAST

Hey guys,

Today I got wooden pallets! I've been trying to find them for almost a YEAR. No transport you see.

Today I found some pallets and took them home one at a time on my BICYCLE! Was as easy as I hoped it would be. I rested the pallet on the pedal and hooked the top corner over the handlebar.

My two compost heaps have been brewing for around a year now. I took the goodness out of them and dumped it into my raised bed. I took the unfinished stuff out of them and put that into my new pallet compost pile! AAAAGH it's awesome. :)

The compost in my raised bed is like devil's food cake. It's so damn rich and perfect and awesome. Best soil in the city I bet.

The compost heap is crooked here on the left, it was fixed after the picture was taken. You can't see in the picture, but on the left side of the bed, I've filled a gap out with cuttings off of bushes and trees. The main reason is that it looks cool and filling out spaces with woody trimmings is a great use for them, but I'm hoping a hedgehog thinks so too and moves in.

I moved my new rainbarrel under the shed, made a base of bricks for it and made a filter for it out of an old duvet cover, tied on with rope. I had to take the rainwater that was in it and decant it into buckets I made out of large plant pots and bin liners, so I could carry the barrel into place. There should be roughly 70 litres caught so far. Still need to fit a spout into the barrel but I can't find one, other than the cheap plastic ones from B&Q. I would like to find a copper one somewhere.

I have things left to do. I have to modify my Evian bottle guttering, so as to direct water to the new rainbarrel. I have to fit a spout to the rainbarrel. I have to bring home as much straw as possible for two reasons: for the new compost pile and to mulch the raised bed. There's no use making all that new soil and leaving it exposed like that. Needs a good layer of something or other.

MASSIVE SLUG IS MASSIVE

This guy slithered out of the freshly-emptied compost bin, like a drunk at closing hours. Obviously he'd been having an awesome time eating for the last 9 months. I picked him up with a leaf and put him in the new pile. I figure if I was all fat like that, I'd much rather be picked up and put somewhere to be left to keep eating. Slugs don't bother me at all. People around here kill them as readily as they used to burn witches. I'm sure I'll change my stance when I have succulent crops. Hopefully get my hedgepig before then.