I continue very excited about my allotment

[kaberett]

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.

Comments

[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."

[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

[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 :)

[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

[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.)