composting and excavating

My compost bin is part of the fence dividing my 'garden' garden from my 'allotment' garden. In the limited space of a town garden these are the decisions you have to make - compost bins attract slugs and snails, which is not what you want near your tender veg plants. The advantage is that when the material is well rotted, it's near the veg plot. The one metre square bin is split in two, and household and garden waste (no weeds) goes into one side, then the other.

The bin provides a good backdrop to plants on the flowerbed side, and setting some bricks into the soil makes a nice path, favoured by all neighbourhood cats. I hope they enjoy hunting any rats that may be lurking. In fact our most recent ex-cat is enjoying it too, since I had to inter Pepper under the bricks, as other unbricked locations attracted too much attention.

In summer months the compost gives off a mild odour, which is only noticeable when you stand very near it. The nearest you get to it in passing is about a metre, or three feet in old money. Inevitably, it attracts insects to do vital work, but these are kept down by scattering straw over the top of the active compost every few weeks.

Experts talk about well rotted compost being like used tea leaves. This seems very unlikely, when you're chucking slops of this and that into the void, and inhaling that acrid smell. Still, the compost I dug out at the weekend was just like dense, fine used tea leaves. Within the solid tea leaf-y mass were egg shells, wine corks, avocado skins like thin brittle leather and dessicated but unrotted split avocado pips. And teaspoons. No babies have been thrown out with the bathwater so far in this house, but teaspoons are at constant risk. They survive better than the wooden pestle I discovered in the last batch of compost I made, which looks gently scalloped, as though made out of driftwood.

Some of the compost has been dug into a trench, awaiting the French beans. The rest will be used over the summer.

Broad beans and burying frogs

I planted my first broad beans at dusk. It wasn't a carefully timed thing, tuning in to the phases of the moon, or whatever. I'd forgotten to do it, and noticed the light was going, and since the seeds had got a bit damp from when I left the packet in the rain overnight it seemed urgent.

I carefully read the packet (I'm fully trained) and cleared the bit of the raised beds newly designated broad bean worthy. The tomatoes will have to go elsewhere this year. I created the 25cm/9 inch wide flat trench 5cm/2" deep and spaced my seeds in trench 1, 25cm/9" apart. I'd watered it already. I then covered the beans in soil, so there they were, planted at the correct distance and depth, according to the packet. I put some chicken wire over the trench, so the cat didn't imagine I'd kindly made him a new loo.

I moved on to trench 2. I had to shuffle around some shallots, which seemed to have been put in the wrong place. I must talk to the help. I shovelled the soil to create another trench, working from one side, and then the other. The light was failing and I thought I'd come across an indication that the cat had been there before me. I poked the indication, and noticed it was a strange shape. And had a foot. I picked up the indication. It was a frog. I thought I was holding evidence that I'd just decapitated a frog. Perhaps the cat had played with it. I decided that once I'd finished the bean planting, I would go all CSI on the frog, within the limitations of my general ignorance, the lack of light and the fact that it was covered in soil, and put it to one side while completing the task. Five minutes later I reentered the house with the floppy frog and looked at it under electric light. It seemed complete, and what I'd thought was spade work on a fragile amphibian body turned out to be a pocket of soil on a loose-skinned hibernating frog. I hoped. I held it out to show my daughter, who asked why are you showing me a dead bird? I waved a frog foot at her and she said a frog was even more disgusting and asked me to take it elsewhere. Since I'd discovered that frogs do bury themselves in soil to hibernate, I went and dug a shallow hole and popped the floppy frog in it, topped it with around 5cm/2" soil, scattered some leaves around and left it, planted like a broad bean, where I hope it is unlikely to be discovered by the cat.

I wanted frogs in the garden. They eat slugs.