The swifts are here.
We have beautiful warm sunshine, and this afternoon, for the first time, I heard them. They were swooping and diving overhead, and calling summertime to each other, so there is hope in the world.
It has been so wonderfully sunny that I have spent much of the day outside. I have had a very exciting time.
I have been digging out the compost heap.
This started because I wanted some soil. The tiresome birds have raided the beautiful coir lining from my hanging baskets for lining nests for baby birds. I am sympathetic to this cause but have been frustrated by the slow erosion of soil out through the resulting gaps.
To say ‘gaps’ implies that there was some lining left, which there wasn’t. Actually what I had was some wire with a heavy clod of roots and soil in the middle of it.
I thought that I would remedy this.
I cut some new linings from a roll of heavy duty plastic that Mark had in the shed. They do not look very beautiful but nobody is going to steal them to make cot blankets.
I put the first one in and wondered what I should do about replacing the soil.
The obvious place was the compost heap.
The thing about this is that the bit at the top is not really soil. If you want soil you have got to go right to the bottom.
The thing about the stuff at the bottom is that all of the stuff at the top is stacked on the top of it.
Our compost heap is not very heap-like. It is made of bricks on three sides and planks on the fourth. All of this space was filled with home-manufactured soil, and there was a very lot of it.
It needed taking apart anyway, because it has started to smell over the last few weeks. Compost heaps should not smell. They should be earthy and fragrant.
I thought that I would do something about it.
Mark found a sheet of board for me to lay in front of it, and I took the planks out.
I was astonished by how quickly stuff turns into soil.
We compost a lot of stuff. Every day there are vegetable peelings and fruit rinds and bits of leaf and stalk left over from salads. Mark helps it all along by weeing on it every night when he comes home from work. This is a brilliant thing to do for compost heaps, and is one of the few things that is doomed to failure when you are a single woman.
The heap was enormous. It does not look enormous on the picture, but it was.
I dug it all out. I filled the wheelbarrow, and the board, and quite a bit of the yard as well. Well, I dug quite a lot of it out. I left some of it in the bottom, and just poked it about with the fork, lazily.
Apart from a few bits on the top it was all well on its way to becoming soil, and the whole lot was threaded through with countless thousands of worms.
Despite this it was not brilliant soil.
It was wet and heavy, not light and crumbly the way good compost should be. It was dark and rich, but not quite right. I have made better compost.
We contemplated this for a bit, and in the end I decided that it was not aerated enough, and it needed layering through with straw.
As luck would have it, we had a pile of this on our field at the farm, left over from last winter’s visiting sheep. It was hay really, but there were a lot of reedy bits in it that the sheep had declined to eat, so it was much like straw, and they had very helpfully pooed all over it as well. Poo is good in compost heaps.
Mark was busy, so I went over to get some.
This was not brilliant fun. The thing about last year’s hay is that it is always full of mites and dust. It is a guaranteed itch for the rest of the day. It is worse than a haircut.
All the same, it was perfect. I filled some bags and brought them back.
It mixed in beautifully. I layered it in with the soil and the worms, and poked two stakes into it all, and pulled them out, a bit at a time as the heap got bigger, to leave chimneys.
It was brilliant, and when I had finished it didn’t seem to smell any more.
It was too late by then to do much with the hanging baskets, so I refilled the one that I had lined, quickly, and planted some seeds in it for good measure. This turned out to be a bit of a waste of time because one of the chains came off when I was hanging it up, and it all plummeted to the ground and had to be swept up, so the seeds might have been lost for ever
All the same, it has been a pleasing day’s labours, and I am feeling satisfied with my world.
I have got a beautiful compost heap. When I build my tropical banana plantation I am going to have the most fantastic soil in it.
And the swifts are here. It is summer.
