Sunday 29 January 2017

Putting the worms to work



This morning I had the satisfaction of plunging my hands deep into my wormery for the first time to extract my first handfuls of worm compost.  The contents of my worm bin look like this:

Not pictured: actual worms.  Worms are shy.
I set up the worm bin about six weeks ago - a simple contraption of two plastic boxes, stacked, with holes drilled into the upper box for drainage.  (The liquid that drains can later be added to your compost as fertilizer).  The bottom layer consists of shredded paper and cardboard that I pissed on a couple of times; on top of that, a layer of dirt; and then comes the key ingredient: worms.  Here they are settling in their new home just after Christmas:



You can buy live worms on eBay.  They will come in the post in a box labelled, "URGENT: LIVE WORMS".  This makes me happy.






I added 300g of tiger worms to the initial mixture, and for the last few weeks I've been gradually adding food scraps for them to eat.  Based on my rummaging in the dirt this morning, I'd say the colony is establishing itself pretty well.  The worms are wriggling away and look nice and fat, and the organic material is breaking down nicely.  The few handfuls of worm compost have been added to my soil/compost mixture (of which details to follow) along with the liquid residue, and so is ready to resume its role in the cycle of life.

I'm feeling very pleased with myself about all this.  Amidst all the horrors going on in the outside world, there's peace to be found in plunging your hands into the earth, letting it get under your fingernails, and under your skin, wherever you happen to be.


Related posts

Contemporary Worm Management Solutions
Harvesting Sage and Feeding Worms

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Tuesday 17 January 2017

Monday is writing day


Here's some good advice: if you want to accomplish something, you need to actually set aside time in which to do it. Blatantly obvious though this is, it's frustratingly hard to put into practice.

This is my take on the subject: don't give yourself a choice. Treat as something you just have to do. In this spirit, I have now set aside Monday as "writing day". Every Monday, no matter what, I will sit down on work on my book. No messing about, no distractions, just do it.

Yesterday was Monday. My first writing day. It went well. I spent probably 3-4 hours just writing and researching, and though I'm still on the ever-expanding introduction (or maybe it's chapter one, it's too soon to tell) I probably got a good three pages written. That feels like a good day to me.

I'm wondering if it might also help if I released the book a chapter at a time, perhaps to interested friends or regular readers of this blog (I know there's at least a few of you). That might stop me endlessly re-writing it, a trap I've fallen into in the past. It would also be a good way to get feedback from kind and intelligent people (oh how I flatter you) before unleashing the eventual monstrosity on the wider world. What do you think? Please comment below. It's about veganism, transhumanism, evolution and that sort of thing. Working title: 'The Vegan Imperative'. Working subtitle: 'Animals, humans and the future of life'. Grand.

Related posts

Vegan Reading and Research
Tuesday is also writing day

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Friday 6 January 2017

A Week Without Facebook



It's easy to overthink Facebook.  If you're a user (and there's a 1 in 4 chance you are, there's over 1.7 billion of us) you've probably wondered more than once whether your relationship with Facebook is altogether healthy.  Are you using it too much?  How many of your "friends" are really friends?  How many times a day do you check it?  Why didn't s/he like my selfie?  Who cares?  Why am I always posting selfies?  Should I post this meme?  Is checking your phone the first thing you do when you wake up?  (Remember when we all first got phones?  We used to turn them off at night.  Imagine that).  Is there a difference between like and "like"?  Why does it feel sometimes that everyone I know on Facebook is living a more fulfilling life than me?  Who am I?  Am I real?  And so on, slippery sloping down into some void or other.  (Pick one, there's enough for all of us). 

Out of all this anxiety, narcissism, and harmless fun, Mark Zuckerberg (sugar mountain?) has accumulated a "net worth" of $48.6 billion.  Whatever that means, one of the things it could mean is that he has enough money to give $6.50 to every human.  There are a lot of humans in the world, but that's a lot of dollars.  This doesn't make him a bad person.  It doesn't make him a good person either.  It's just a fact.  Other facts include the fact that Zuckerberg claims an annual salary of only $1, practices a materialistic minimalism in his attitude to clothing, and has actually said, in public, "I've made enough money".  Which is of course easy to say when you've made as much as he has, but how many other public billionaires can you imagine actually saying that?  Imagine Donald Trump saying that.  Zuckerberg's not the only billionaire with such an apparently indifferent attitude towards material wealth, but he's in a minority among that minority.   It's more than you might expect.  I find it interesting that such a minority exists at all.

This post isn't a rant about the vices or virtues of Facebook, though.  The ontology of social media, and the internet in general, fascinates me - and the way the web is tapping into a spirit of communitarian anti-materialism, even more so - but these aren't subjects for discussion on this little blog.  It's easy to overthink it, as I said - not just for philosophers, whose job is overthinking things - but right here in the unrefined everyday.  That's the anxiety again.  Facebook is part of the furniture of mundane existence now, whether you're a user or not.  It's everywhere.  When you're not gawping at your own phone, look at the person sitting next to you on the bus gawping at theirs.  They're on Facebook.  People walking down the street, navigating through fellow gawpers with that evolving sense we're honing of being able to look where we're going without actually looking where we're going - they're on Facebook too.  Right now, all around you, everywhere.

Again I'll stress that gawping at your phone is neither intrinsically good nor bad; it's just reality.  That said, it's no wonder logging out feels like such a big deal.  Of course it's not, but last week, in the spirit of something or other, the spirit that drives me away from the daily grind of individuality, the spirit that writes this blog, I logged out.  I announced on Facebook that I would be doing so, for fear that my overuse might be turning me into a nobhead.  Which is as eloquent a way as I could put it.  So I logged out, and that was that.  The feeling was akin the one descended on a room when you turned off an old style pre-flatscreen TV.  The calm as the static dies away.  It reminded me of when my grandparents used to turn their TV off when Songs of Praise or Last of Summer Wine had finished.  They didn't just put it on standby (it didn't have a remote control, so that wasn't even an option).  They turned it right off.  Then Grandad would unplug it from the wall.  He would emphasise, for reasons I forget, how important it was to do this when you had finished watching TV.  And it felt as if the whole room had suddenly changed shape.

It was a week before I logged in again.  When I did, I had 27 notifications.  That's not a lot really: I probably get around that many on a normal day of Facebooking.  So one way of looking at it is that one week off Facebook is as long as one day on it.  Time slows down when you log off.  This is certainly a good thing.  It's also worth reflecting, in that kind of context, that online life goes on without you, that your voice is only a drop in the ocean, and various other humbling metaphors that might jumpstart some meditation on the meaning of Facebook for you.  As with so many other things, it's impossible to underestimate the restorative power of taking one step back.

Related posts

Taking the Zero Waste Plunge
Sitting on a Landfill (Waiting for the End to Come)
On staring out the window
A Brief Rant on the Nature of Things

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Monday 2 January 2017

Sexy Soil Testing, and Other Brief Motivational Musings


I thought I might make my first post of 2017 'new year' themed, but then I thought actually, no, I wouldn't.  No day is any more (or less) special than any other; and as everyone knows, new year's resolutions almost never last past January.  Why?  For just that reason.  You aren't any more motivated to improve yourself or the world on New Year's Day than you were on New Year's Eve.  It's just a date on a calender.  The world is still spinning.  2016 was awful - another thing everyone knows - but 2017 is no more likely to be wonderful because of that.  There is only now.

It is almost always more difficult to want to do something than it is just to do it.  The key is being honest with yourself: what do I really want?  Not an easy question to answer.  You know what you're supposed to want: health, happiness, an aesthically appealing bum - but do you?  Maybe you want a big, fat, ugly bum.  Maybe you want to be miserable and sick.  Unlikely, of course, but being honest with yourself in our topsy-turvy world can yield wildly counter-intuitive conclusions.  Dare to be honest, and don't dismiss any thought just because it feels wrong.  Sit quietly and think, really think.  What's important to you?
Left to right - pH, nitrates, phosphorous, potassium.
Darker colours indicate higher levels.  Green = pH approx 7.5

The answer doesn't have to be profound.  So just now, what's important to me is testing the compost I've accumulated in preparation for my indoor vertical gardening project.  The soil test kit I bought on amazon arrived yesterday (for some reason, I thought it was meant to be some kind of day off) so after preparing my sample, I got to work on the tests.

Results showed my compost is somewhat on the alkaline side, but with healthy levels of phosphates, nitrates and potassium.  Kale is one of the first plants I want to grow, since I've read you can start it quite early, and perhaps even grow it year-round indoors, and apparently needs a lower pH level, meaning I need to find a (hopefully organic) way to bring it down below 7.  Aluminium sulfate looks like a promising solution here for lowering pH levels quickly, but I need to investigate this a bit more.

That's it for now.  Happy new minute.

Related posts

Microgreens grown in allotment soil
Seedling and Indoor Gardening Update
Old Man in the Spring (A Success Story)

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