Sunday 8 March 2009

Sunday 8th March 09

Quite a good day, very productive in the garden, as Gill helped me tidy up a bit... well, a lot! I am very untidy, probably too many things going on at once, and the garden has lots of plastic sacks with compost, and 'contraries' which I've taken out of the compostables I've retrieved (aka rubbish and 'dry recyclables' such as aluminium cans and plastic bottles) and today we removed about 6 sacks of genuine waste from the garden.

I made a load of seed compost (growing medium), out of ordinary 'garden' compost, sand which was thrown away by the school, and I bagged up and brought home yonks ago, leafmould and some loam salvaged from turves from a skip. I put this lot through a big riddle, and it arrived on the sheet below in layers, so when I'd put the right amounts through (ie, not much rich compost, more sand and leafmould), I shovelled it into my rotasieve to mix it well, and then slid batches of this into, you've guessed it, plastic sacks!

I also did some more log stacking, outside the front door, of dry logs that are ready to go on the stove. However, my usual ability to make a stable pile was somewhat lacking today and the pile collapsed, and took 30 minutes to rebuild. The trick is to not make it in three separate vertical walls which I had been doing, but to do it in horizontal layers with lots of interlocking pieces which hold the thing together. Difficult to put into words, maybe pictures would be better.

Gill made a rice-based dish for tea, I added some salvaged butternut squash which I'd cooked on the stove earlier in the day. Lovely.

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