Pile Dynamics

Today's Activities:

• Chores.
• Collected a few wheelbarrows full of compost from a far off compost pile and brought them near to the greenhouse for use in making potting soil.
• Moved the brassicas (bok choi, broccoli, etc..) and some leeks and onions out of the greenhouse and into our 'hardening off' area.
  
• Jarrod and I put the finishing touches on the harvest table. Well, we covered the edges with a plastic strip. I highly doubt this whole resurfacing endeavor is going to work. We're likely going to be left with a bubbling mess once the water hits the particle board.
• Lunch.
• Jarrod and I fixed up the sign out on the road. It had been knocked down from the wind and rain yesterday.
• Sifted through the ashes of the burn pile with a magnet to collect leftover nails. What a strange job. It felt like we were post-apocalypse, scavenging the wastelands for the now-rare metals and trinkets of a cheery but forgotten world. I'm sure there's a blues song somewhere about this job.
• Then I spent a long while making potting mix.
  

Making the potting mix was also a bit of drudgery, but in someways calming in its methodical routine: fill up the wheelbarrow with ingredients, mix, sift each shovelful of the mix, repeat. Here's a look at the process:


That's sifted compost to the left, a bag each of carbonatite and vermiculite, a wheelbarrow full of the mix, a sifter, and just beyond the sifter, a sifted pile of potting mix.

Actually, looking at the piles can be rather interesting. I noticed that the piles have different shapes depending on their composition. For instance, here's a comparison of our sifted potting mix with a pile of all the gunk leftover from the sifting:


Interesting, huh? The leftover bits don't pile as steeply. It turns out the angle noted above is known as the angle of repose, and is dependent on the "density, surface area, and coefficient of friction of the material". The wikipedia article is a bit unclear on this, but I gather this term refers to the steepest angle of a material in a pile, and so my diagram above may not be entirely accurate.

Changing tracks, I know I promised a photo of the back wall we created, so here it is:


Framing the windows was probably the hardest part. Anyhow, just 'cause I can, here's a photo of the seedlings experiencing their first time out of the greenhouse: