Excavation one

This morning saw the the right hand tranche, the first of three, of compost taken out of the brick compost bin and banked up behind the new daffodil bed. The snap above taken about a third of the way in. Mattock handle visible right - the mattock being just the thing for initial breaking out. Then the spade for cutting. Then the fork for transfer to barrow.

Plenty of young woodlice and not so young pale green slugs behind the front cover.Just the one worm of any size inside. Plenty of fibrous roots, possibly from the hawthorn behind and the honeysuckle box to th right.

Now cut most of the way through to the back now. In the course of which I discovered that the various plastic bags which came with the cheese from Neal's Yard Dairy (mostly when I was doing mail order at the height of the recent pandemic), were not bio-degradable as advertised, despite being cut into quite small pieces, and despite some of them having been there for getting on for two years. I picked quite a lot of the pieces out before moving the compost on, visible left in the snap above, in the hope that another few years at the bottom of the heap will do the trick. Perhaps by bio-degradable they meant in one of those big digesters, not in a natural compost heap. Which would be a bit odd given that I believe that the founder of Neal's Yard Dairy is big in the world of (natural) woodland burials.

First tranche being backfilled with the yet-to-rot top cover.

Up close and personal. From where I associate to hills when cycling, say the one running up to the Ruxley Lane junction on the Ewell by-pass: they look much steeper when you are looking straight at them than they really are.

Two more tranches to go. Let's hope the foxes do not make too much of a mess of the bank which is now coming on behind the new daffodil bed. Where, I might say, we have a few fewer daffodils coming up blind than has usually been the case in recent years.

PS 1: to get the front cover off, there was some undoing knot action with the spike on my trusty army knife. All the stuff they used to tell us about stones and horses hooves is for the birds. See the end of reference 3 for snap of same.

PS 2: does not look as if I am going to manage as neat a job as I have managed in the past. Not very used to this sort of thing any more.

References

Reference 1: https://psmv3.blogspot.com/search?q=empty+brick+compost. The last emptying that I have managed to turn up. There must have been one since then, so maybe I will find it in the hours to come.

Reference 2: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2020/09/compost-bin-second-day.html. Minutes as it turned out. Clerical error.

Reference 3: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2019/12/pain-one.html.