New front

The compost bin got very full and compacted last year and although it had sunk some inches of late with all the rain we have been having, I thought it was time to dig it out again. As far as I can recall, I last dug it out properly in early March 2012, banking up the compost dug out behind the new daffodil bed, which provided many smells of interest to the neighbouring Jack Russell. Which recollection does not quite tally with the observation of March 13th 2011 in the other place that clearance is a biennial event.

All the lonicera pileata (see 17th March 2013) make this a bit awkward so the drill is to do it in two halves. First, remove the front and dig out the lower half, digging maybe a foot into the compost. Replace front. Second, doing about a third of the heap at a time, push aside the top layer of rotting compost, dig out the rotted compost from above.

On this occasion, it was clear that the melamine covered chipboard front had had it, not surviving removal in very good shape. I can't find any record of when I installed it, but I suspect between two and three years ago, so not really the long life that I had thought the melamine covering would have given it. To replace it, I have recycled some of the garden shed dismantled last year, rather soft and old now, but at least it has been cuprinolled at some point in its life. We will see how long it lasts in its new home. I observe in passing that in reusing the shed, one throws away about half as much as one uses. Just like reusing curtains, where the new window never seems to be in any very convenient relation of size to the old.

The compost at the front of the bin was very wet, as wet as I have ever found it, but it got drier as one got further into it. Lots of red worms in the wet compost, far fewer in the drier, but I was not sure whether the worms liked the wet or whether they were trying to escape it before they drowned. Quite a lot of fibrous roots had pushed into the compost, seeking an easy feed, perhaps from the lonicera pileata.

Half the compost has gone behind the new daffodil bed, the other half will go behind the two rose bushes at the end of the back lawn, two places I can get at without messing up the waterlogged and fragile lawns.

Rounded out the day's horticultural activities by checking on the state of the bramleys (from the next door standard) in four trays at the back of the garage, two of them the trays used for storage & transport of eating apples, complete with the moulded black plastic linings which provide individual resting places for each individual apple, recovered from Epsom market. The bramleys were in reasonable condition; a bit spotty now, but generally sound: individual resting places seem to work. Three of them were cored, dated and baked for dessert for lunch and were entirely satisfactory. But, together with the bramleys which were already in the ready store at the front of the garage, we must still have a couple of hundred apples left and it is not clear how many of them we are going to get through before the balance gets fed to the compost heap: they can't go on for ever. What we really need is a pig.