The smelliest job so far!

Last night I moved the composter from the dark side of the patio to its final home by the strawbrary.

Fiddliest and smelliest job I've ever had to do in that garden, and I've done poop patrol!  

  The baseplate for the composter arrived, finally, after one lost delivery and one delivered broken.  I could not get that thing to fit on.  Nope.  No fitting on for that baseplate.  I chalked it up to the fact that it was cold outside, the composter body was at 0ºC while the baseplate was at room temperature, and so Physics has a thing to say.  In reality, this was my excuse for saying "sod it, it's 0º out here and this smelly thing is making my hands wet in 0º!"  I ended up laying the baseplate on the ground and standing the composter over it.  The weight of proto-compost should hold it all together.  

  Sliding the body of the composter up over the contents was a bit tense - would it stay together like a putrid blancmange or would it go everywhere?  It stayed!  The rest was work for a fork, a shovel, and eventually a hose.  The contents were somewhere below half the height, but as the thing is slightly conical I reckon it's full to about half the volume, or 165 litres.  Whilst I was forking out compost I took the opportunity to study the strata within.  Some bits seem to decompose faster than others.  Things that are watery (like cucumber) or mushy (like banana) seem to go first.  Things with a hard shell (like the pumpkin from Halloween) appear to take a lot longer.  Eggshells break down surprisingly readily.  Any leaves that get in there seem to turn slimy.  

  I've taken a photo of some of the strata, laid out on one of my favourite childhood building materials: the knackered, rusty sheet of wriggly tin (of dubious acquisition).  For the sake of your breakfast I've left out the bits where putrefying is actively taking place.  Upper layers on the left, lower layers in the right.  Rightmost is damn near compost!

This time next year, Rodney, we'll have compost.  

Fat cakes

So I got a great tip from Julia at Stages of Succession, and ran with it.  Fat cakes are a way of keeping birds in your garden over the Winter, which raises the overall bird-friendliness of the garden.  I want birds and other creatures in my garden, because a greater biodiversity means fewer little sods eating my crops.  Encouraging birds and other predators in is cheap and organic, while using pesticides costs money and is arguably poisonous.

Into the blender I've put:

• A couple slices of bread too stale for toast,
• The fat leftover from yesterday's roast potatoes,
• A small pinch of salt,
• A leftover carrot,
• Some nuts,
• Some lentils,
• An apple that had rolled away unnoticed yesterday whilst I was making cider, from apples...

The resultant paste I put into the ice cube tray and froze overnight to drive out excess fluid and make it firmer.  It also keeps those I'm not using right away fresh.   

I've put three cubes in a shallow tray on the roof of the strawbrary.  I chose that spot because the overlapping wire panels of its roof make it impossible to sneak silently across.  Birds and squirrels sit unmolested there now because the local cats have learned there's no profit in stalking up there.  That was the best I could engineer at the time, though when I've got a few bob spare I plan on attaching jingle bells to the underside of the wire near the joints.  

In other news, the cider's ticking over nicely.  At the bottom of yesterday's page is a short clip of the airlock, taken an hour after the vessel was sealed, bubbling at a rate of roughly 2.5 per ten seconds.  The clip below on this page is from this morning.  Now bubble rate is an interesting proxy for fermentation rate.  Obviously you can't measure alcohol content in real time, and nor can you sit and watch the yeasts eat, but the bubble rate suggests how much sugar they're eating.  From this clip, I'd suggest they're having a twenty course Roman orgy in there!

Autumn Maple

  So it's Autumn, for the originators my 62 British pageviews this past month.  30 might call it Fall while 152 would call it Herbst (according to Google, at any rate).  It's bloody cold after what weather reporters called "Freezing Friday", which to me just conjures an epic yet PG-rated quest being undertaken by a polar bear, a puffin, and one very lost penguin.  All of them singing jaunty songs about snow and things that rhyme with snow, which thirty years later prompts heated (but largely esoteric and thus widely ignored) debates as to whether the word "Eskimo" is racist.

But I digress...

  The big maple growing through the roof of the Strawbrary is having its annual shed.  I've not yet managed to get a photo which includes the entire tree - Google Earth notwithstanding - so suffice it to say the thing puts down enough leaves each Autumn that the garden becomes effectively cushioned.  Any deeper and I'd have the cast of Jackass wanting to fling Wee Man off the roof in a Superman cape.  Ordinarily I'd just leave them to rot over the Winter, but this year is different:  this year I'm getting a brew on!

The fallen leaves thus far - and it's only the start of the shedding - are scraped up into a plastic bin.  

Once it's filled, pressed down and filled again (because leaves trap a lot of air!) I poured three litres of water over the top of the leaves, replaced the lid and weighted it on with a stone.  

That'll rot down over the coming year.  The resultant liquid - known as leaf tea - can be diluted to one cup of the tea into a watering can of water for use as a high nitrogen feed for the lawn and other nitrogen-hungry plants.  The leaves which wouldn't fit into the bin can be mulched directly onto the lawn.  

In other decomposition news, the compost is coming along nicely.  Some berk put bread in it though, which is doing nothing so much as turn blue.  I must remember to pop round to Nathan's house for some horse manure.  

And I found this leaf in my bean patch.  It's not the Vicia faba that I planted, and nor is it anything that I've seen in this garden before.  It's of a firm, rubbery texture.  My hand is in the shot, and for scale I wear size 7 gloves.

If anybody knows what in Earth that is, please comment below.  Ta muchly :)

Corner Arbour part 3 (finishing)

So we've built our skeleton around the cornerpiece.  Now to finish up.

The seat should be made of 2x4 like the uprights, for solidity.  Cut the ends to 45° (converging) and lay upon and between the horizontal beams of the back skeleton, as to be parallel to the hypotenuse of the cornerpiece.  In this case, I've also encroached the seat onto the front-left part of the skeleton so as to create a wider sitting space.

The roof is the only part of this structure that could be considered flimsy, being built of palletwood.  I've built up the corners of the roof in layers, so that there's no vertical gap through which rain can fall, but plenty of spaces for vines to creep through.  

The blank spaces can be filled in with ready-built trellis, or you can make angular shapes with 2x2 as I've done here.

And here it's best to customise it to your garden.  The front-right side is facing into the shady side of a tree, so instead of putting in framework for all the climbers that won't be going there, I've put in a shelf.  The brackets for the shelf are just the 45° offcuts from making the seat.  

While the front-left side is where I'll be growing some kind of flowering vines (maybe clematis, maybe jasmine), so here I've put in the highest density of framework.

At the foot of the front-left side I've put in a box.  It's open-bottomed to allow free access to the soil.  It's pretty much just there to protect my vines against the mower and/or strimmer.  

And now it's all stained and squared away in situ.  I had to get a neighbour to help lift it, as it weighs ten stone and it's the approximate cubic volume of two adjacent phone boxes.  

24m of 2x4 and 12m of 2x2.  Total cost of the wood was about £80.  Total cost of the whole build was about £100.  Buying one of these in the shops would be £300-£400 easily.  

Job done, I could do with a good cuppa.  

Anybody know anything about chicken husbandry?

On the virtues of palletwood.

It's handy stuff, and there's no sniffing at free wood.  Now, there's quite a spread with palletwood in terms of quality, but if you catch it fresh enough then it's alright.  Now, I wouldn't use the stuff for any great structural applications and I sure as hell wouldn't sit on it, but it makes decent side panels for planters and such.

I needed a new tray for the herb nursery, so here's what I've built:

Not fantastic, but the seals are decent and you need to half-fill it with water before it starts leaking.  The stain is Wickes bog-standard woodstain and the white paint was nicked from our Emily's school supplies.  

This runs a serious risk of turning into a carpentry blog.  Are we in favour of the odd how-to-make-X posting?  For damn sure it's more interesting than digging.  

I'll put up a better picture when the light's okay.  Goodnight :)