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:

Picking Rocks

Yesterday's activities:

• Did the 'chores' for the animals. (Essentially just mucking out the milking stalls and giving the cows and pigs hay, and also yummy slop for the pigs).
  
• Transplanted lots of tomatoes, and peppers. This took most of the morning.
• Lunch.
• More transplanting.
• Ali and I dug up and transplanted a 200 foot row of Sweet William that survived from last year.
  
• Jarrod and I worked on resurfacing the harvest table.
• Jeff and I did an inventory of irrigation equipment and decided on what joiners we'd need for the delivery and header lines.
• Jeff worked most (all?) of the fields for veg. The intention is to break things up, kill some of the weeds -- in particular the Twitch Grass (aka. Couch grass. The same annoyance I fought with in Australia, along side Kikuyu).
  

Today's activities:

• Chores.
• Changed the oil, and oil filter, and battery on one of the white van.
• Jarrod and I made tables to fit in the van so that we could carry an extra 16 flats of seedlings out to the field.
  
• Lunch. Ali made smoothies. That's a highlight.
• I washed four crates of potatoes, two of beats, and one of rutabaga.
  
• Jeff, Jarrod, and I cleared a space along side the greenhouse, laid tarps and pallets down so as to make a space for 'hardening off' the seedlings before we transplant them. 'Hardening off' refers to giving the seedlings time to adjust to being outdoors (rather in than in the warm, moist, and very controlled environment of the greenhouse).
• The three J's then went to pick rocks from the fields.
• During this time Ali walked the fields to measure and mark them so that we know exactly where the rows begin and end.

Picking rocks is a rather fun process, especially in the afternoon. The three of us spread out about 10 metres apart and then walked the length of a field searching for rocks as big or bigger than about two fists held together (i.e. from average human brain-size to genius human brain-size up to genius Martian brain-size). There's something extraordinarily pleasant about walking under a big sky and talking about whatever (family history, television shows, garden tools, ....). All the while criss-crossing the field and lifting stones out of it, hearing them quietly clunk together as you each throw them into piles. It's the sound of rocks hitting each other that I find most alluring -- such an essential and calm sound.

Today was the first day I've felt any real sense of tiredness during the day. Sluggishness is more like it. I think it's the heat. It only lasted for about twenty minutes. I'm sure I'll meet this feeling again.

Doing the chores has been quite fun. Minus the fact that everyone calls it "chores". I've always hated that word. It reminds me of a vaguely delirious world, slightly askew from my realm of comfort and normality -- i.e. marshmallows baked on top of sweet potatoes, cottage cheese, saying Grace at dinner, face cloths, brick walls in a kitchen, etc. If I think too hard about it these things individually and out of their context they all seem just fine (in fact, I love the idea of taking a moment to cultivate a thankfulness for your food before eating it). It must just be my history, or memories I have associated with these terms.

In any case (phew!), actually doing the morning chores is great. It's a entirely new experience for me to navigate around a living chesterfield with horns (i.e. a cow), unclip it and then pat and talk it out to the paddock. The routine involves releasing each cow (just five) from the milking stalls and leading them out. These animals seem to emote surprise and a little knowing and willful stubbornness with the way they turn only their eyes back at you when you direct them to move. Then, after a moment of consideration, they give up with a small huff as if acknowledging that the outside world isn't so bad after all, and swing around to leave in a wide and lazy three-point turn.