Thursday 30 June 2011

Wednesday 29th June 11

I got up early to load up my trailer with the shredder.  Then at 8.30 I cycled in with our youngest and when he was in school I got the school extension cable and ran it from a socket in the sports hall to the path next to the compost heap.  A few weeks ago the school was decorated with a vast amount of vegetation, which before I arrived would have just been thrown in a pile and forgotten, once it had been taken down.  However, I asked for it to be put next to the compost bin I built, and today was the day to process it into something compostable.

I spent about 3 hours dealing with it, and also started to manage the existing compost bins, a pair of New Zealand bins, full to overflowing with uncomposted sticks and quite a lot of soil, and ants.  I pulled out lots of sticks and shredded these too.  I'll be riddling all of this material quite soon, so that Dave the gardening teacher can have some nice composty soil to do things with.  He commented that it looked a bit time intensive, so I told him it would make great compost and not need riddling, like the unruly pile of soil and sticks would... and that will take some time!  I got quite prickled with the bits of rose stem in amongst the shreddables, and bitten a lot by the ants.

I chatted to several people whilst working, all pleased to see something being done with the compost.  I'm glad the school are positive about it!  Much better than Lord Deramore's; that was a battle.

I came home for lunch and spent an hour on the computer before going back to pick up our little cyclist.  I went via Country Fresh and collected about 80kg of stuff, some of which I put on top of the woody shreddings, to help rot them down.

When I got home I did another batch of riddling, compost and loam, to make a potting mix for some tomatoes and cucumbers, which I proceeded to plant up.  I also did some weeding under a hedge in preparation for cutting it soon.

So a productive day outside.  In the evening I lit the stove and did a massive wash up, and prepared 24 'Chiquita Minis' for drying, tiny and very sweet bananas, from Country Fresh.

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