Oh, The Wiggly Worm....

Danny and I have amended the lyrics of Spiers & Boden's The Prickly Bush (from their great album Bellow - Amazon link) to sing as we move some worms from their old home in the temporary compost bins to the swanky new ones.

Oh the wiggly worm
That wiggles in my compost
If I take it for a ride in me wheelbarrow
Then I promise that I won't get it lost

We've given lots of worms a lift over and goodness me, but this compost thing is going remarkably well. Not only have the old temporary things provided us with plenty of compost in doublequick time to improve our beds for next year (see below). But the new one that we transferred the stuff into just the other day is already doing great. The first picture shows what's going on just digging down a foot or so into it - the second should hopefully give some impression of the heat of it, with the steam coming off it. It was actually hot, rather than warm, to the touch dug down a foot.



Much of this has to be down to using the magical bokashi effective micro-organisms, or whatever they are - from good old Wiggly Wigglers. The latest batch of that was the thing I was burying in the new heap.

It was a beautiful autumn day today. Blue skies, a little chilly: just the sort of day for working in the garden before the forecast foul weather arrives. Below is a picture of the blue-plastic beds that should hopefully get working over the winter as well as a snap of the beech tree we can see from our garden. Finally today I cut back the loganberry, all the dead and previously fruited growth from this year - and then I tied back the new growth, all neatly off to the right, which should give us a good crop of fruit next summer.



That, along with ground-levelling work, left me well ready for a pint of the current garage beer.

Another great thing in the garden is the number of birds we've got visiting at the moment. The numbers of magpies has gone down significantly - hopefully somebody's on the case controlling their numbers, because they were a real pest. Now, thankfully, we're getting lots of smaller birds: coal tits, blue tits, great tits, dunnocks, robins, wrens, blackbirds and thrushes, rather than gangs of magpies. And on the subject of wildlife, as I clear the shrubs and cuttings and level off the bit of the garden that's going to be the boys', I'm having to re-house more frogs than I've ever seen before. I hope they can be as happy and thrive as much eating the slugs in our 'veg-zone' this year!