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.  

Cool Animal of the Month, 01/13: the Harlequin Toad

In Pictures: MugGate!

This is what happens when the same bunch of activists are cooped up together in the same place for too long. If they don't get new blood, new ideas, the occasional voice of reason, they start to get a bit... sidetracked. Next thing you know it's "OMG there are TOO MANY MUGS!"

  This is a real conversation that I was involved in.  I'm "Bill Door" below:

  It's funnier with rum.  

Update:  I've since been banned from Occupy London for "flaming".  Apparently it's now offensive to point out that we've got bigger things to worry about than mugs.  

Primary Succession

This is cool.

Norderoogsand has sprung up from beneath the sea like a kraken of sand.  It has since become home to 50 plant species and a bunch of sea birds.

Photo: Telegraph

  Dunes rise above sea level all the time and usually sink just as readily, but this one is different.  What makes it different is the same force which has driven our evolution from bacteria to human beings: luck.  Call it chance, fate, divine intervention, whatever.  The right factors were in place at the right time.  Those factors were a mild sea and the presence of spores from simple plants.  The mild seas didn't destroy the proto-island, whilst the spores grew into simple mosses and lichens.  Those mosses and lichens put down roots and bound the sand into a basic soil.

  Once a moss organism dies it decomposes into compost, adding organic matter to the sandy soil.  This organic matter - or humus - contains carbon, nitrogen, and other essential elements.  Birds drop guano containing further essential elements and ions such as calcium, potassium, sulphates and phosphates.

  Over time, the soil becomes rich enough to support more complex plants.  The seeds for such plants are also carried over in the stomachs of birds.  These plants have deeper and stronger root systems which will help bind the deeper layers of the soil.  When they die, their roots will decompose and leave humus in the deeper layers.  Eventually this process will clear the way for shrubs to take hold.

  There is a selective pressure here.  A selective pressure is a natural force which says "A can live here but B cannot".  In this case it is the salt water.  Sand doesn't hold rainwater very well by itself, so for now all the moisture is seawater.  Only those plant which thrive on beaches or in areas with high salinity will be able to live on Norderoogsand in the early stages.  Once the soil is rich enough in deep humus to support shrubs it should also be absorbent enough to retain rainwater.  Even so, it will still be quite saline.  Coastal shrubs will be best adapted to these conditions.

  The potential for trees to grow on Norderoogsand is uncertain.  Soil that sandy might not hold a tree firmly enough.  Deposits of lime from bird droppings will gradually improve the soil structure.  Clay would make a nice addition, but it will not arrive there by itself.  If sufficient generations of plants live, reproduce, die and decompose that peat has a chance to form then that is perhaps the best chance we have of seeing trees arrive on Norderoogsand.

  Higher land animals are highly unlikely until the ground is very very stable and the plantlife is sufficiently fecund.  Likely it'll just be birds and amphibians until the trees appear.

  Alternately, the island could be helped along.  A little clay, a little peat, a couple bay trees and this island would be halfway toward a climax community.  This won't happen though.  Biologists and geologists will argue - and rightly so - that Norderoogsand should be left alone to be observed.  Primary succession is a rare occurrence, so the data which can be gained by watching it happen from scratch is scientifically invaluable.  It can tell us something about our world that we do not yet know.  The process of succession is slow, but when seen from end to end is a miracle of nature.  I urge you to keep an eye on it.

I wish I was there...

Bargain of the year!

I picked this up in a charity shop on my way home from Kew.  £4 for 4.56kg of book, or 88 pence a kilo.  Unreal!

Now bring on the weekend so I can waste my day off playing Mass Effect.

My Botanical Adventure

Went to Kew Gardens for the first time today.  I really should've gone sooner.  The guide thingy suggests you leave yourself two to three hours to get around the place - aye, sure, if you're an anorexic on a souped-up granny scooter being piloted by the Stig!  I was there for five hours and I reckon I'm lucky if I got to experience half of it.  I'm going to include the bulk of the photos on a separate page because I took 103, but I'll post a choice few here.  I went in the Winter, so I presume you've got to see it again in the Spring, Summer and Autumn to really get a sense of the lifecycles of the specimens there.

 Me amidst an amazing collection of palms and ferns

The Coffin Tree can grow to be among the tallest trees in the world!

This fish was watching me.  

This Cycad is older than Kew Gardens.  Cycads as a bunch are older than the dinosaurs!

And for reference, here's a cycad being munched on by a Triceratops

This is a Banksia, named for a local boy...

There's a gallery of botanical art there, it has its own building, The Marianne North Gallery.  It features a load of paintings by Marianne North plus the Shirley Sherwood Collection, a collection of paintings by various artists.  There's a whole section on fungus for any myco geeks.  Sadly, no photos allowed.

I stopped for a burger halfway through.  It was a hell of a burger!  Venison.  You heard me; a venison burger!  Venison, in a burger.  I'll stop now.  

There were piranhas

The turtles were nothing like the ones you see on the telly though.  They weren't even armed!  Bit naff really.  

Now the Kew Pagoda is a bit of a local landmark.  You can see it from over the Thames in Brentford, from half of Richmond and Sheen, and of course from the top of a 65 bus.  So I decided to see where in the Gardens I could grab the best long shot of the Pagoda.  

Here's it up close

The Treetop Walkway is the highest publicly-climbable structure in the Gardens.  The Pagoda is taller but you aren't allowed up it.  Here's the walkway:

I expected the views from there to be amazing, and they are!  You need to get that high and see Brentford, see Sheen, to remind yourself that you're still in London.  

But the view of the Pagoda was obscured by tree branches.  

Still, at least in the Winter you can see it at all.  In the Summer that'll be a wall of green.  The view from the top of the Temperate Greenhouse (the biggest greenhouse) is significantly clearer, albeit with a big tree blocking part of it

Best view however was straight down the Cedar Vista from the corner of that wee lake in the North of the Gardens:

These parakeets live all over Richmond Borough.  A shitload escaped from some private collection back in like Victorian times or something and the rest is history.  Their ubiquity in Strawberry Hill has seen them nicknamed "green pigeons".  

I saw a Japanese Minka house.  These were made of wood and ridiculously versatile and durable.  

I saved the Evolution exhibition for last.  It was cool, though some prat had vandalised part of it.  It was full of fossils, ancient living species and models of ancient extinct species.  These Liverwort have been around for 400 million years - twice as long as the mighty Cycads!

A fossil

Aaand I'll put the rest on a side page, because there's bloody loads of them!  Suffice it to say that a great day was had and I'll be back there in the Spring.  

Amazon fail!

I ordered a baseplate for my composter 2 months ago.  After 6 weeks I messaged them to say it hadn't arrived, so they re-sent it.  It's just arrived now, I get it out of the bag and it's cracked through.  FML!

On the plus side: my festive blues have lifted and I'm visiting Kew Gardens tomorrow.