All Muck and Magic

Mark gathering the riches from our pile of "black gold"

Yet again, if we were superstitious, we might think that Mother Nature had it in for us. Today was the delivery of our composted manure, which was welcomed by snow flurries and strong winds - not ideal weather!

April and Chris were undeterred,
despite their wet, cold and mucky
first session with the team

Composted manure is not too bad to work with, as most of the smell has gone, but it's much heavier to move than fresh and quickly gets even heavier when it's wet. Still, the volunteers are made of strong stuff, and everyone set to with a will. We even managed to re-organise some of our compost bins which suffered from some over-enthusiastic filling at a company volunteering day a while back. They ended up full of weeds that really shouldn't go in a bin, so it needed the careful attention of Joyce, who carefully raked out the roots of the nasties and spread the finished compost on one of the beds.

 

After that, we re-built the compost heap in layers of dry material, and strawy manure that hadn't quite rotted. This should hopefully heat up quickly, even in the cold, and rot well, so it should be great for growing pumpkins and squashes in the Summer.

Joyce and Mark refilling the compost
bin in perfect approved style

 

It really was a miserable day, so we gave up on our plan to cook, and decamped to Collins "Legendary" Cash and Carry Cafe for some chips and a well-earned warm up!

Thanks to everyone who helped for all your efforts. Hopefully we'll be reaping the rewards in the Summer!