kaberett | I continue very excited about my allotment

On Saturday afternoon I met a slow worm. Ridiculous little what-the-fuck shoelacey noodle of a not-snake. I think it is the first time in my adult life I have knowingly met one? I shifted some composty bits to move them into the bin and there it was, doing a startle-freeze of SUDDENLY A SKY PREDATOR, and I stared at it and it stared at me and after a while it decided that Fuck Alla This and slithered further down into the pile to eat more woodlice, and I very gently replaced the top bundle of grass etc that I'd lifted up and backed away. A. just about caught a glimpse of its tail as it finished vanishing.

I then had a certain amount of confusion when looking it up to confirm that I really had seen a real-life actual slow worm, because I was very certain that the thing I'd seen was bright yellow with a black stripe down its back, but all the sources were describing female slow worms (THERE MIGHT BE BABIES) as "golden-grey". It took me A While to work out that I needed to translate from "ordinary people" to "geologist", i.e., yes, the fucker was bright yellow, we're all good.

On the vague topic: having fed the ridiculously extravagant compost bin a relatively parsimonious amount over that preceding week, I was a little alarmed when I showed up to feed it on Wednesday (with packing peanuts, thank you relevant friend) and found it was only at an internal temperature of 40degC. I was therefore very relieved on Thursday to find that, having got started digesting a lot of dandelion leaves and bindweed and paper and cardboard in addition to the packing peanuts, the internal temperature had risen to 50dgeC again.

It is a ridiculous extravagance and I'm still delighted about it. I haven't actually tested the "mulch out in 30 days, mature compost out in 90" yet -- it hasn't been in situ that long -- but I can feed it pizza boxes! I can feed it my moulted hair! I can feed it actual perennial weeds and it will just cook them yea verily unto death and turn them into compost for me! It will eat compostable kitchen bags that you can't cold-compost! I don't have to turn the heap! It's warm and you can hug it! The local cat has not yet quite worked out whether it is A Good Warm or A Kitten-Eating Monster!

Also my fennel looks increasingly like incredibly weedy fennel, and one of my butternut squash vines has an actual flower. Given how late I got them germinated I'm not holding my breath for actually getting any fruit off them before we get frost, but hey, it is An Adventure, and they're growing a flower.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

From:

redsixwing

Holy moly, your compost is cooking! And congratulations on the slow worm, who is probably delighted with the Good Warm.

Mmmm fennel. Mmmm butternut. Even if you don't expect any fruit, I quite like eating the flowers.

From:

kaberett

I am SO EXCITED about this bin.

And also very excited about making miscellaneous butternut-and-fennel things. :D

From:

boxofdelights

You can eat squash blossoms! That first one is probably male, since squash plants tend to start making male flowers before female, so it probably can't make a fruit and has no female flowers around that want to be pollinated. You can pick it and saute it! Here's one possibility: https://www.simplyrecipes.com/recipes/squash_blossom_quesadillas/

Even better, dip it in beaten egg and breadcrumbs and fry it!

People are silly about how much better food you have grown yourself tastes, but they are not wrong.

From:

kaberett

Yes! :D I need to generally get my act together and I probably can't be bothered faffing with cooking the blossoms if there's only one of it, but those are one of my favourites :-) Even I have feta in at the moment so could do the that thing.

From:

venta

Ridiculous little what-the-fuck shoelacey noodle of a not-snake

Best slow worm description ever :-)

From:

kaberett

It is possible that I spend too much time on tumblr :-)

From:

venta

Ah, while I spend no time on tumblr, so it sounds highly original :-)

From:

kaberett

Works for me. :D

From:

el_staplador

Compost! Slow worm!

From:

kaberett

I am SO EXCITED ABOUT THE SLOW WORM.

"It is not a snake, it is a legless lizard!!!" I said, to A, all excitement.

"... u wot m8," he said, approximately, being a City Child who broadly considers these things interchangeable.

Whereupon I delightedly taxonomied at him.

From:

niqaeli

I honestly originally thought you meant they were actual worms, based on the name and the appellation of not-snake. XD I mean! It didn't seem weird in the context of a garden! Although I was a bit baffled at the notion of an actual worm staring at you. I am less baffled having looked at photos and also seen this comment now.

(I.... have an actual degree in biology, is the hilarious bit here. Also, I grew up in rural Tennessee. Admittedly, no actual field work in biology was involved in that degree as it was only undergrad, but still. *g*)

From:

kaberett

They're sort of weird tiny little hidey aminals so it's entirely reasonable to have never come across them! My mum grew up in rural Cornwall so was familiar with them, so I know about them, which in turn means I am PROPER DELIGHTED to have a pet one in London.

Aren't they ADORABLE, though.

From:

sebenikela

Yeah I had to go google because I'd never heard of a slow worm either--apparently we don't have them on this continent!

also (from wikipedia): The "slow-" in slowworm is distinct from the English adjective slow ("not fast"); the word comes from Old English slāwyrm, where slā- means 'earthworm' or 'slowworm' and wyrm means "serpent, reptile"

so that's neat!

From:

kaberett

THAT IS FANTASTIC THANK YOU. "it's a worm but also it's really NOT", yessssssssssssss

From:

ewt

SLOW WORM! Compost!

From:

ironed_orchid

Those all sound like good things and the allotment sounds like a good place to spend time.

From:

forthwritten

I am glad that your compost bin enjoyed the packing peanuts! Thank you for taking them off my hands and making them into something useful.

From:

fyreharper

Hello a New Creature! Yayyy slithers.

From:

rydra_wong

OMG SLOW WORM!!!

I saw one in the wild once (panicking and fleeing off a path where it had been sunbathing) and was so thrilled.

From:

kaberett

One of Papa's excellent stories is about marching through jungle, and spotting a snake on a sunny patch of path ahead. Hmm, they think, better be careful of th-- oh, no, it's just a stick, fine, and carried on as they were, in the process drawing closer. It did not take much of this for them to decide, once again, that it was almost certainly positively an actual snake -- but as soon as they'd convinced themselves of this it turned into a branch again. Obviously.

This continues right up until they're pretty much about to step on it, whereupon the branch slithers off sharpish into the undergrowth.

From:

cesy

Hooray for slow worm!

Could I collect my compost in a fancy compostable kitchen bag and then give it to you? I am currently just binning it, and keep thinking I should get organised to find a friend who can use it. Do the bags keep it from stinking up the house, at least for a short period?

From:

kaberett

This is a potential option!

To minimise smell, you would pretty much EITHER want to put at least a couple of handfuls of shredded paper in with it (to absorb the liquid) and see me at least once a fortnight, or (possibly more usefully) keep one of said bags in your freezer and keep everything frozen up until we manage to get our acts together to share space. (To minimise smelliness & misc liquid the aim is to minimise anaerobic decomposition versus aerobic composition, and also to absorb liquid that does form; doing so for medium-term storage can be tricksy.)

I am also super happy to take pizza boxes that can't go in general recycling -- the bin eats them very happily, too :-)

From:

sebenikela

your compost bin sounds awesome! Your allotment adventures make me think I should look into community garden type things near me... (look at me talking about literally putting down roots, woah)

Random, sorry if obvious: If you can find some, wood ash is a great additive for various micronutrients (also P and K) and managing pH.

In Mali I learned that termite mounds are also full of good things for compost (plus termites take the place of earthworms as soil aerators because worms can't survive the dry season), but that is less relevant and more "interesting fact."

From:

kaberett

(I talk very wryly A LOT with my therapist about putting down roots, yep)

we're allowed fires from November to April so on-site wood ash generation is achievable; also someone in the row of houses just the other side of the wall was burning? most of the hazel tree? this afternoon??? on the site????? which means there's an additional pile of wood ash, which we have EVERY INTENTION of liberating for anti-slug and general fertilising purposes :D

Termite mounds are great for SO MANY THINGS. Do you know the thing about gold/diamond exploration and termite mounds? Would you like to? :D

From:

sebenikela

ooooh do termites collect shiny things for their mounds?

They are such neat critters, even if I did have to keep moving test plots around in Mali to avoid the old mounds messing up my experiments ('data excluded because termites' and 'data excluded because accidentally goats' were two common notations)

and yay for convenient sources of wood ash :)

From:

kaberett

It's not precisely that they collect shiny things?

It's more that -- okay, so, Traditionally, In Days Of Yore, the way people went prospecting was to take a map, and plonk a bloody great grid down over the top of it, and just mechanically sample at every grid intersection regardless of whether what was there was in fact e.g. an elephant. (I exaggerate only slightly.)

This led to some really weird patterns: a single geographically-isolated sample, f'rex, that contained in comparative terms A Fucktonne of diamonds, just sort of floating like an island in the middle of an otherwise diamond-free expanse of land.

... it was a termite mound.

It was always a termite mound.

It took them A While, however, to actually get enough data points and pay enough attention to notice this.

It turns out! That some of the reason termite mounds are great for soil aeration! Are exactly why they are also full of gold and diamonds: they dig down A LOT, and bring actually very impressive amounts of material back up from the depths with them.

... material that sometimes happens to be a seam of diamonds.

So these days quite a lot of industrial prospecting boils down to "eh, let's go poke a termite heap": sampling surface rocks is unlikely to show up any diamond seams that people didn't actually already know about, frankly, because if they were that accessible they were that accessible, but termites? Termites are GREAT. Termites do ALL THE DIGGING FOR YOU.

:D

From:

steorra

Þis is really neat. Þank you.

(Þe letter þorn contributes to þis post because I accidentally typed one at þe beginning and þen þought it would be fun to include þem.)

Edited Date: 2018-09-13 06:37 am (UTC)

From:

ewt

(Also, is

seedclub of interest?)

From:

kaberett

ooooh, yes it is, thank you!

From:

hairyears

Yay slow-worm!

I'm told they are quite common, but I have never seen one.

Also: not that I'm stalking you or anything but, as a result of this DW post, I have now been prompted for the *perfect* romantic gift for my beloved.