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Showing posts from May, 2023

The Meadow Maker

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Yesterday, I visited the community orchard I maintain in Plymouth's Central Park. One of my previous posts describes it in some detail. While there, it was the orchard's understory rather than trees that caught my attention. Let me rewind a bit to explain.  Last summer, I stumbled across a patch of yellow rattle ( Rhinanthus minor ), on the far side of Central Park from the orchard. They are lovely flowers. I always think they look like a choir of singing parrots pointing their yellow beaks to the heavens. I returned to the spot later in the season to collect some of the dried seed heads. By the way, the species gets its name from the fact its seeds literally rattle inside these heads . I collected the seeds to spread in the orchard, which is exactly what I did. I seeded them into a little patch by cutting the grass short and raking in the seeds to ensure they made good contact with the soil.  I went to all this effort because yellow rattle has the alternate name of meadow m

Elegant Composting

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As I'm sure you can tell from my previous post , composting is a topic close to my heart. So, when I stumbled across the method Joel Salatin and his team use on Polyface Farm in Virginia, USA, I got quite excited. Joel farms grass-fed beef cattle. In winter, he houses his animals inside due to Virginia's harsh weather. Inside the barn is where the magic happens. I've, honestly, never heard of a more elegant composting solution. Essentially, by simply behaving naturally, Joel's livestock breeze through all the heavy lifting.  The process starts with the cattle themselves. They do what cows do best and poo day in and day out inside the barn. Rather than carting the manure away to slurry pits, Joel and his team simply cover it over with woodchips and straw right there on the barn floor. Over the winter months, this pile of poo and carbon grows higher and higher to well over a metre.  By spring, isn't everything buried literally in sh** you might ask? The short answer