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August 10, 2019

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compost, Death, Gardening, Permaculture, Recycling, Soil, Waste

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Scientifically hot: in which I fall in love with the Berkeley method of composting

Revenge is a dish best served cold. Particularly when you are seeking revenge against a tree. Given the pace of their lifestyle, you have to drag it out for those guys to really feel it.

So how better to punish a seed-strewing, bat-choking, weedy cocos palm than – not simply chopping it down – but committing it to a doom of eternal proximity to rotting horse shit?

How to torment a cocos palm: shower it with shite

What a red-letter year it has been for composting. The year when I discovered the Berkeley method. It sounds like natural form of contraception and it is hot, but it’s better than that because it works. Time after time after time.

I have thought I had achieved the giddy heights of hot composting before, long ago when Treasure the white Sussex was queen of the chicken run, freaking me out by regularly supping from my vat of compost tea.

The much missed Treasure and her dangerous drinking habits

In those days I was convinced that the way to fast, weed free compost was my trusty tumbler, still the first destination for our kitchen scraps and chookhouse bedding. The tumbler certainly steams when you crack it open to add the week’s potato peel and apple cores, and not just on these winter mornings.

But I guess, like so many other lovely things, you don’t necessarily know whether you’ve really hot-composted, until you actually experience it Then you realise that on all those previous occasions when you thought what you were doing was pretty hot, you were wrong, and in reality it was all distinctly tepid.

Chickens looking for worms in my now-cool heap

Ingredients for my first heap: leaves, ash, straw

First “brown” layer

Layering leaves and manure

Another layer

Covering a pile with palm fronds

So what is the Berkeley method of hot composting and how do you get some of that good stuff?

The Berkeley method involves making a big heap of compost – at least a metre tall and a metre wide – all at once, using layers of high nitrogen (“green”) and high carbon (“brown”) ingredients.

I’ve used a a range of different “browns” – liquidambar and bamboo leaves, pine needles, sugar cane hay from the the chook cage (with its own little payload of nitrogenous ordure) and even cardboard boxes ripped up into small pieces. This is a soothing activity to do in front of television and the only part of compost-making I can get my children have anything to do with).

Berkley method heap 2 featuring lots of bamboo leaves

I usually try to sneak in some partially-rotted “warm” compost from my tumbler as a “green” layer low down in the heap just to keep our household waste systems from being overrun with biomass. As a small household, we don’t really produce enough veggie scraps all at once to create the bulk materials needed for the Berkeley method. Other people use thin layers of lawn clipping but we have chooks so we don’t have any need for lawn mowing. That’s an understatement really – for much of the last three years our backyard has looked like the Somme.

My mainstay for “greens” is, ironically, distinctly brown – vast quantities of equine ordure, acquired at $1 a bag from the horsey country on the other side of the Berowra Waters Ferry. I’m pretty sure my ten or fifteen bucks, left in an honesty box by the front gate, ends up in the pocket of a shovel-fit teenager, which gives me a warm glow. You could get the same amount for free in another farm down the road if you had a trailer and good upper body strength.

It’s a fun weekend outing – I particularly enjoy coming back across on the ferry with the windows down, suffusing the palatial surroundings of the marina and its smattering of Hollywood celebrities with the fruity ambience of a stable.

The always picturesque Berowra Waters Ferry

But if your idea of a good time doesn’t involve intimate encounters with 150 kilos of horse manure, there are other options. Not carnivore poo though. Just in case you happen to live near a zoo and were thinking of a midnight raid for high nitrogen materials, Robert D. Raabe, Professor of Plant Pathology, Berkeley, in his detailed account of hot composting, reminds us that tiger and lion shit are not worth the effort.

In my first few heaps I also added some wood ash after each layer – it‘s high in potassium, can correct acidic soils and since our wood-burner produces loads of it I’m always trying to think of uses for it. There’s also a kind of wedding like gaiety to hurling handfuls of white powder over the mountain of poo which I really enjoy.

I think I got a bit carried away on my last batch of compost, though, as I discovered when my youngest did a science experiment: broad beans growing in three different soil types. My newly made compost was literally off the scale on the Ph test. My vegetables are probably suffering but I suppose at least I now have a convenient lime-rich place for disposing of fresh corpses.

Super-alkaline ash-rich compost

The science experiment in action

Each layer of your heap should be watered as you build it, til the whole thing is about as damp as a squeezed out sponge. If it’s especially wet or hot weather you can cover it to stop it from drying out or getting soaked. As you can see in the piccies above, I roofed my first Berkeley heap with palm fronds, partly to keep my heap from getting too dry and partly just to continue to torment the spirit of the evil tree they were hacked from. None of my subsequent heaps have had a cover, though, and they seemed to turn out just fine.

To be honest, while there are lots of really complicated rules for hot composting – for instance, this article gives a mind bogglingly detailed run down on the carbon-nitrogen ratios of a range of composting materials. But in my experience, a rough and ready mix of about equal quantities of “greens” and “browns” just seems to work.

Then after you’ve built your heap, you just leave it for about five days. All the while you are at work – sitting in meetings, shuffling paper or cruelly inflicting post-structuralist theory on innocent undergraduates – that aerobic bacteria is doing its thing. It’s a curiously comforting thought.

Chooks cleaning up the last few weed seeds

Then you turn your heap. The aim of Berkeley method hot composting is to create a friendly environment for the right kind of bacteria and fungi – the ones that like plenty of air. They work quickly, produce plant nutrients like nitrogen, phosphorus, and magnesium and even smell pretty good (trust me on this). Over the first few days after you build your compost pile, a sequence of different bacteria go to work – first the psychrophilic, then the mesophilic, and finally, once the heap gets to about 37 degrees celcius, the thermophilic. Once the pile gets up to between 55 and 70 degrees, the heat kills off weed seeds and most insects (and some bacteria too). But the thermophilic bacteria quickly use up all the degradable materials unless the heap is turned.

But how do you know if your heap is hot enough? Here’s the advice of one permaculture site: “as an simple guideline. if you can put your arm into the compost up to the elbow, then it is not at 50 degrees Celsius, and is not hot enough”. If the idea of a forearm coated in hot shit doesn’t appeal to you, you can also use a cake thermometer. But perhaps not on the same day as the school bake sale.

I don’t bother with thermometers. After the allotted number of days, I just dig into the guts of the pile. If steam comes pouring out, creating a sort of horse-poo sauna for the shovel wielder, things are cooking. Best not to turn your heap in your PJs or your ballgown,though.

I’m not so sure about white stuff you can see in the picture on the right. According to the University of Illinois‘ composting boffins, this is actinomycetes – “a higher-form bacteria similar to fungi and molds” which feeds on the woody bits in the pile and helps make well cooked compost smell earthy. Robert Raabe, Dr “Afraid of lion poo”, thinks it’s a good sign in hot compost. But it usually turns up in an nonaerobic pile so this pic indicates that while my current heap is hot it probably have been turned a bit earlier.

As the old joke says “What’s the difference between a good gardener and a bad gardener? Two weeks”. Still, with a turn over and a bit of oxygen, I reckon my compost will get back on track. A perfect heap might require that horse do-do up to the elbow but a pretty good heap seems to be manageable without that level of commitment.

My technique for turning the pile is quite primitive – kind of like knocking down a stinky sand castle. I dig into the steaming centre of the pile, shovel the hottest part of the heap to one side (up against the remains of the tortured ex-cocos palm). Eventually the undercooked layer above caves in in a satisfying way. I do that a few times, so the outside part of heap is in the middle, ready to heat up again.

Somtimes when I’m tending my compost heap, I feel like I’m channelling the spirit of a brush turkey dad, as he scratches his big pile of mulch around, keeping the temperature just right for his clutch of eggs.

Brush turkey bloke tending his nest

Having turned your heap, you let the heat build up for a couple of days and then you turn it over it all again. And then again every two days or even once a day if you ever get over-excited. That goes on for about two weeks. The write up of the Berkley method in the University of California’s Vegetable Research and Information Center (my kind of place) stresses that “outdoor exercise is an added benefit” of hot composting.

For a kayaker, all that shovelling is not bad thing at all, leaving aside the fabulous pile of compost you get at the end of the three weeks of relentless digging. It’s hot composting and hopefully you get hotter in the process of making it. Truly, there is no downside.

Some other posts about gardening experiments

My attempts to grow luffa…. no it doesn’t come from the sea!

Night of the living mulch: cover crops for the zombie apocalypse

The ginger family stole my brain!

DIY by subtractions: the kiwifruit arbor

From battery to backyard: the story of our rescue chickens, Dusty, Crumpet and Ruff

Turning our garden into whipbird habitat by making a mess

References

Antonella Anastasi, Giovanna Cristina Varese & Valeria Filipello Marchisio
(2005) Isolation and identification of fungal communities in compost and vermicompost, Mycologia, 97:1, 33-44

Yan Guo, Jinliang Zhang, Changyan Dengand Nengwu Zhu (2012) Spatial Heterogeneity of Bacteria: Evidence from Hot Composts by Culture-independent Analysis Asian-Australian Journal of Animal Science Vol. 25, No. 7 : 1045 – 1054

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mccnmatt

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January 28, 2019

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Backyard birds, mating, Native birds, Satin bowerbirds, Uncategorized, Waste

The bowerbird bachelors

You know life has been intense when an incident from the backyard in spring doesn’t make it to the blog until the tailend of summer. Our backyard re-enactment of “The Bachelor” had to be at least four months ago because satin bowerbirds only do their courtship routines from April for September. The bowerbird dating show was a while ago now, but it was a truly memorable occasion.

A couple of times in the past we’ve found some blue items – pegs, bottle tops – in the bottom of the garden, collected together and rearranged over a period of days in a mysterious and seemly significant way. But this time the assemblage was visible from our back verandah. We had ringside seats for the show.

Though he was decked our in the iridescent black of a mature male – something that only happens when satin bowerbirds are at least seven years old – our bachelor seemed to be new at this. There was no signs of a bower per se, just his collection of pretty objects in an unsalubrious corner of the garden. I spent a day on the deck “working from home”, watching him shuffling them around. The milkbottle/yellow leaf combination seemed to be a particular favourite.

Satin bowerbird with milk bottle trophy

A dangerous blue toy

A favourite combo – yellow leaf and milkbottle

After quite a bit of this faffing around, he had a visit from a female.

Female satin bowerbird comes to look around

Cue bending, twisting, flapping of wings, along with some impressive eye bulging.

Courtship behaviour of the satin bowerbird – bowing

Flapping…

…and eye bulging

Well, impressive to me but possibly not to the visiting female. I know it’s anthropomorphic but this face screams “get me out of here!”

“I’m a satin bowerbird… get me out of here!”

And indeed, within minutes, a second male arrived on the scene, having surveyed the situation from afar. He had a look around, somewhat dismissively it appeared, and then abruptly flew off with the female in tow. I almost heard him muttering out of the corner of his beak “C’mon babe”.

Second male looking on from the distance

Second male not very impressed by our bachelor’s display

Our bachelor, thwarted, seemed to decide that inadequacies in his collection of blue objects was the key problem. My kids had helpfully (if problematically from a plastic waste point of view) scattered some colourful gee-gaws around the back patio. Our guy seemed concerned that one of the “house” wattlebirds might have an eye on the azure ornaments that were key to his sexual success. It was on.

Showdown between bowerbird and wattlebird

“Mess with my blue things and I mess with your foot!”

One distinctly irked bowerbird

Having put the little wattlebird firmly back in its box, our lovelorn male returned with additional trinkets to pimp his bower. But to no avail.

More courtship display

Unimpressed female bowerbird

There were other visitors that afternoon, but despite sustained and prurient interest, I saw no signs of sexual congress and the next day there was no repeat performance although the blue objects remained in their inauspicious arrangement by the woodpile.

However, a couple of weeks later the abandoned pile of treasures received another inspection from a “green” – presumably a young male who hadn’t yet earned the glossy violet-black feathers of a grown-up.

Juvenile male pimping the bower

“And these sticks should go… there!”

He seemed to be practising his courtship display, favouring golden twigs rather than the milk-bottle/leaf combo. He had that eye-bulge down pat already though. I wonder if we will see him back – perhaps in the mottled black-and-green plumage – for the next season of the Bowerbird Bachelors.

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August 10, 2018

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History, kayaking, landscape photography, national parks, Uncategorized, Waste

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The Great War and rubbish

Hole pattern abstract

There’s nothing I like better than a scene of elegant industrial decay. Place that ruin-porn in the tranquillity of the Hawkesbury at midwinter. What could be finer than a paddle around a rusted out wreck on a still morning, in the company of breakfasting eagles and kites?

The rear of the Parramatta and the slopes below the M1

Rivets and rust

Oystershells of rust

White bellied sea eagle with breakfast

Fisherfolk with fish

What surprised me, back on land, when I dug around to find out more, was the age of this beautiful ruin. The Parramatta was the very first ship commissioned for the newly formed Australian Navy after Federation. It was built in 1910, the first of six torpedo boat destroyers to be constructed by Fairfield Shipbuilding and Engineering in Glasgow. The destroyer was part of the Australian Fleet in the Pacific during the Great War, hunting enemy ships up the Sepik River in New Guinea, patrolling the waters around the Phillipines, Malayan and the East Indies, and later, battling submarines in the Mediterranean and the Adriatic.

The interior of the wreck of the Parramatta

It’s been a very long time since the Parramatta did what she was designed to do. She was taken off to be dismantled in 1929, when my granddad was a toddler.

Native rock orchids… I think!

A mangrove growing through the hull

But in her post-naval career, she’s certainly been reused a few times. After being decommissioned, she was sold to the NSW Penal Department, along with her sister ship The Swan, and towed to Cowan Creek where each boat was to accommodate 50 convicts. The prisoners were supposed to work on a new road from Bobbin Head to Brooklyn that was to be “the finest marine drive in the whole world”. The stretch from Windybanks to Bobbin Head was declared a detention area, but in the end, with a change of government and not a single vote in favour of the plan from the Kuring-gai Chase Trustees, the idea of building a road was shelved and the boats were sold again. Their purchaser hoped (ultimately fruitlessly) to use them as a floating hotel for fishermen. It’s rumoured they went on to house unemployed men and store water during the Depression, before being towed to the north end of Milson Island and used as a floating sand and gravel pit.

Flowing fog at Milson's Island - the location of the Parramatta is on the right

Looking north past Milson’s Island – the wreck location is near the right of the photo

In the early 1970s, the historical significance of the wreck was began to be appreciated and the bow and stern of the ship were retrieved and preserved for posterity – the stern at Queens Wharf Reserve on the Parramatta River, and the bow at the Garden Island military base in Sydney. Other bits have been less officially repurposed – all its valuable brass portholes, for instance, have been nicked.

The back of the Parramatta

Hypnotic ripples

Mangrove saplings

It’s not really clear how the wreck ended up on a mudbank on a bend of the Hawkesbury. It’s rumoured she and her sister ship The Swan were being towed downriver in a gale in 1934 when they broke away. The Swan filled up with water and sank twenty metres deep in the river near Little Wobby public wharf, while the Parramatta was stranded in the shallow water amongst the oyster farms below Cascade Creek.

Looking over to Grace’s Shore in Muogamarra National Park

She’s not the only bit of flotsam and jetsam on that bend of the river, though, by a long shot. I pulled in amongst the mangroves to stretch my legs below the waterfall, to find all manner of rubbish. A discarded shopping bag was filled with drink bottles, polystyrene, coke cans, bait bags and the odd thong in a matter of minutes. I even found a functional tupperware container and matching lid, some thing that I almost never see in my own kitchen cupboards.

Parramatta with hills amended

I have no pictures of any of this trash, needless to say. Unless it’s on the epic scale of Edward Burtynsky’s sublime depictions of industrial landscapes, utterly transformed by excavation and waste, our tide of plastic detritus is nowhere near as photogenic as the rusty bones of our military past. But it will will last hundreds, if not thousands, of years longer.

Rust abstract crop

Other local history posts

The Hawkesbury vs the engineers: some history of the Hawkesbury Railway Bridge

Canberra on Cowan Creek? The strange and beautiful story of Smith’s Creek.

The ghost freeway: the wildlife and history of Mooney Mooney creek

Two sad islands, three whistling kites: stories from Peats and Barr Island

Further references

Boon, Paul (2017) The Hawkesbury River: a social and natural history, CSIRO publishing.

Mangroves through the bones of the Parramatta

The escarpments above the wreck

Metal textures

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March 15, 2018

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Backyard chickens, Damage caused by chickens, Exclusion pest control, fruit trees, Garden trees, Recycling, Waste

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Sweet dreams, baby avocado

It’s hard to love a plant with a death wish. I’m on my third generation of spindly unwell looking avocado trees now and it’s starting to get old.

It’s hard to believe that a plant that springs spontaneously from seeds carelessly cast into the compost could be so very hard to keep alive. Pretty much all the other trees I’ve sourced from the prompt and knowledgeable online nursery Daley’s Fruits have taken off without a hitch, but after several years of abject failures I’m starting to feel like the Avocado Angel of Death.

Or maybe it’s not me, maybe it’s my naughty chickens. My avocados need protection, by which I don’t mean armed body-guards, though I’m not saying I haven’t considered that.

Apricot the Sussex playing the innocent

Futon base protection for my nashi pear

New growth on the nashi pear

I planted a low-chill nashi pear a few years ago in a perilous location, right next to the giant trampoline that is the social hub for all the neighbourhood kids. It’s going gangbusters, despite the ever present danger of being crushed by pre-teen gymnasts and the surrounding scorched earth environment created by the chooks. The enclosure I made for it out of the slats of a bed base found by the side of the road, for all its “chook-house tolerances”, is still going strong.

The bed-gate

Winter and the neighbour’s chicken, Big Jenny.

Shima and Apricot creating a scorched earth environment

And the gate constructed from a surplus-to-requirements Ikea bed continues to serve its purpose of keeping all but the most determined and agile chickens out of my bush tucker garden.

Who knew bedroom furniture could be the key to a flourishing food forest?

With these sleep-related successes in mind, I decided to turn to a wooden cot, long stashed under the house, into surrounds for my two poorly looking avocado trees. You often see cots like this by the side of the road during the council cleanup, so this is a project for everyone, even those without anklebiters.

My suite of tools

With the addition of a handful of mismatched screws and a small number of shelf brackets I bought on an over-excited visit to the hardware shop many moons ago, I was able to put two surrounds together from one cot in my dining room in the space of a few hours. Warning: do check the dimension of your door frames before trying this at home.

Surround 1 done and about to start on number 2

Brackets at the base of the surrounds, screws at the top

The first surround featured the rather stylish cot head and foot, spliced together with the cot base (cut in half). The four panels for the other were made by bisecting the two sides of the cot. With a modicum of creativity, I was able to use the holes already drilled in the frame and a few self-tapping screws. The only time I needed a drill was to add the slightly unglamorous pieces of hardwood across the top, which I included to ramp up the degree of difficulty for ambitious or athletic chickens (Winter the escape artist leghorn, I’m looking at you!) to fly inside. Those with fatter or more docile chickens might not want to bother with this addition.

The nice thing about repurposing existing furniture if your carpentry skills are as impaired as mine, is that you can rely on the expertise and functional set-square of the person who put together the joints in first place. So the finished surrounds look fairly regular, despite my inadequacies with a tape measure.

And so far, despite a giant tree being hacked down more or less over the top of them, the surrounds seem to have done the job. The chickens have done their level best to squeeze between the slats but haven’t quite figured out how. The avocado roots are no longer being ripped from the ground on a daily basis in the search for invisible but delicious invertebrates, and the trees are (perhaps overly optimistically) producing new leaves.

“There’s gotta be a way in somewhow”

“If only i had a longer neck”

On my past track record, it seems highly likely that these avocadoes are still doomed, but at least I’ve done my best to put their troubles to bed. Sleep well, little trees!

The two cot-surrounds in place

New growth

The girls having a dig

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August 18, 2015

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Backyard chickens, chicken coops, Recycling, Waste, Work

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Having fun with no money

Palm Beach of a morning

The untimely death of our favourite chicken Shyla has generated unaccustomed scenes of activity in our backyard.

We are not a dynamic household. We are a posse of ponderers and ruminators, hoarders and procrastinators, ever ready with a “let’s not rush into things” or a “perhaps we should pause to examine this problem from all angles”. In a disaster movie, we would be the bit-part characters who are consumed by a rising tide of magma while considering our escape plan from the easy chair with a view of the volcano.

But all that changed this week. Fate intervened, in the form of a generous Hungarian freecycler whose guineapigs had gone to on a better world, leaving behind them the Taj Mahal of pet enclosures.

Sunroof on Colditz, the new chook cage

They say money makes the world go around. But does it really?

Just add up all the things people do for love, or for family, or to be neighbourly or because it seems like it might be a hoot, and all stuff you can grow or swap or get as a hand-me-down or find by the side of the road (or, if you are my boat-building neighbour, at the bottom of the creek). The gift economy may not have its own stock exchange, but things would grind to a halt pretty quickly if all the tuckshop volunteers, weekend soccer coaches and grannies with strollers called it a day.

As Noam Chomsky says in this fab video “We don’t have a capitalist system. No capitalist system has ever survived“.

Freecycle is a case in point. With a trailer and a tolerance for cyberloitering, I reckon in less than three months you could completely furnish a McMansion without spending a cent. Your home would admittedly be rich in bulky exercise equipment, large lamp shades, and clothing for the under threes, but still, the sheer quantity of stuff on offer is impressive.

And that’s without even considering what you can buy with the local currency – the Opera – in Sydney’s community exchange system – bartering with more bling, I guess you could call it.

Our new chook house was miracle of timeliness. Fabulous finds on my local freecycle facebook page are snapped up almost instantly. In fact, even implausible things like half-used bottles of shampoo to be collected immediately from Mona Vale seem to be claimed with surprising speed. The new predator proof run – Colditz, as I’ve provisionally named it – turned up just before we headed off for an out-of-town family weekend. Without the generosity of strangers, our chooks would have been an all-you-can-eat buffet for the newly emboldened feral foxes.

Abby and Snowball considering the problem of Colditz from all sides

And then there was the gift of Dave. Having eyeballed pics of the cage on facebook and figuring it was a shonky wood and chicken wire job of the sort I might cobble together myself, I reckoned if I knocked off work early, RB and I could wrestle it onto the top of our old Subaru Forester. But hearing of our dead-chicken woes, Dave, RB’s workmate and ex-trucker, insisted on driving down from his place on the Central Coast, an hour away, to help us out.

And thank god he did. Turns out our new 3 x 1.5 x 1 metre chook run is has rivets, a steel frame and weighs as much as a Panzer tank. I could no more have lifted one end of it to head height than unicycled to the moon. Dave, on the other hand, had the Hilux, the roof-rack, the reversing skills, the muscles and the shipping-big-things savvy to sort it, no wuckers. Thanks Dave. You are a legend.

Hoping for child labour

But not planning on it

It may not have the casual elegance or aquarium-lid clerestory window of Palm Beach, my own vernacular modernist masterpiece, but Colditz has a number of winning design features – most impressively, a sliding roof to cut down on the lower back pain associated, for inconveniently tall adults, with egg collecting (I’m hoping child labour will make the sliding sun roof unnecessary, but my track record of achieving such outcomes is poor).

What the new coop lacked, however, was a roost. Having googled what the modern chicken requires of a night – apparently, just like in the contemporary bathroom, square is the new round – this is what I came up with. Soft on the feet, in a range of widths for chickens of all shapes and sizes.

It looks disturbingly like bondage equipment. Who would have thought old bicycle inner tubes and a repurposed wooden ladder could be so kinky?

Bondage perch

Closeup of bondage perch

It is possible that the girls prefer something a bit vanilla. Given a choice, they seem find their way back to Palm Beach at dusk, where they can sleep in a egalitarian fashion, all on the same dowdy round perch, without even a whiff of rubber.

But don’t worry, with a bit of discipline, we’ll soon sort that out.

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mccnmatt

Posted on

December 8, 2014

Posted under

Death, Fruit, Garden trees, Recycling, Vernacular architecture, Waste

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The waste management business

Heavy rubbish day. Or as it’s known locally, the council cleanup. No words strike more fear into the hearts of your loved ones, if you are a gardener with an ample shed and an insatiable love of junk.

I was left momentarily unsupervised today, and all the good work of a weekend of chucking stuff out began to go into reverse. I know it’s a sign of my hoarding pathology, but I really struggle to imagine why someone would ditch a barely scratched inch-thick slab of gorgeous red gum about half as long as my kitchen.

Here’s the only plausible explanation I could come up with: it had been used in the commission of a mob murder. “I know, I know, Vinnie had to go… he knew too much… but since he “went on holiday” I just don’t feel the same about that big chopping board…”

Today’s found objects

Another road-side acquisition of the last 48 hours (the coffin-sized item pictured below) also suggests restless nights and guilty secrets. I swear the pruning saw was in-situ before I even considered taking this photograph. Such measures may be necessary when “spring cleaning” for those of us who only have possession of an electric mulcher, suitable strictly for lighter duties.

Okay, not quite long enough, but there’s always the pruning saw.

All this “waste disposal” has perhaps been a bad influence, since today I had to do a piece of work. I got a place ready, somewhere nice. No need for concrete boots (or indeed blood and bone) just a very old pair of Blundstones and some hair clippings at the bottom of a hole. We had a problem: our new associate, low-chill Tropical Sunshu nashi pear, had to be put in the ground.

Shyla pretending not to notice the disposal of the boots in case she’s next

Who needs blood and bone when you have Blundstones and hair trimmings?

We put her in the ground, and we put her in a box. In that order, suggesting I’m no wise guy. Though I can say, hand on heart, that she’s gone to her narrow bed, to sleep the Big Sleep, since the box we put her in was constructed of not merely one, but two bed frames. Those beds may never have concealed any horses’ heads, but they were absolutely and definitely products of the waste management business, a business I should clearly for the sake of my family (and my shed) try to leave behind.