Pig Sty Avenue

Cleo assumed this position at the allotment gate the second we arrived: none of her usual sniffing around. Hates bad weather, that dog. So I didn't hang around. There was a new bag from the florist, approx 10kg of green material. I dumped that by the heap, not taking the time to turn it over and mix in the new stuff. There was also a large amount of kitchen waste - a bag of split peas past their sell-by date, and a bag of frozen peas which had been pressed into service as a cold compress, plus the usual teabags and turnip peelings. But the headline news is in the photo below: ambient temperature 3C, (on a thermometer nearby) and the compost thermometer showing 15C. Still a long way to go: I've read that with regular turning a heap can get to 50 or 60C, (though I've never seen that myself), so maybe it's on the way. I was turning it every other day, but this week have left it alone since Tuesday. I'll turn it again with the new material over the weekend. ...

...I've noticed people's eyes glaze over when I try telling them about it face-to-face. What's wrong with them? This is fascinating stuff! To recap, there's been a compost heap in the far NE corner for 18 months or so now, nothing new added to it since the summer. I'm resisting the temptation to tidy that up and put what must now be fully degraded compost onto one of the beds because that corner will be a winter refuge for frogs and invertebrates. Nearby, I started another heap, between the fence and the pond. The reason for the location was that I'd noticed when I was away in 2016 that that area got heavily weed infested, not to say jungle-y, and one way of scuppering weeds is to make their corner of the plot into a work area, in a "these boots were made for weeding" kind of way . This heap was made up mostly of the florists offcuts, and guinea pig litter, which seems to have led to a really good C: N ratio because it composted really quickl...

  A very, very brief search has given me the refs below for initial reading. I'm starting with the grammar and pragmatics. Haven't even tried to search, yet, for CDA angles. Aikhenvald, A.Y., 2013. Imperatives and commands (Back Pages; Appendix: Imperatives and commands: how to know more: a checklist for fieldworkers), Oxford: Oxford University. Press. Anderson, J.M., 2007. The grammar of names . Oxford: Oxford University Press. Davies, E.E., 1986. English vocatives: A look at their function and form. Studia Anglistica Posnaniensia , 19 , pp.91-106. Downing, B.T., 1969. Vocatives and third‐person imperatives in English. Paper in Linguistics , 1(3), pp.570–592.  Formentelli, M., 2007. The vocative mate in contemporary English: A corpus based study. Language resources and linguistic theory. Milan: Franco Angeli , pp.180-99. Zanuttini, R., Pak, M. and Portner, P., 2012. A syntactic analysis of interpretive restrictions on imperative, promissi...

I visit the allotment most days, with the dogs. I take down the tattie peelings, tea bags and eggshells for compost. And deal with any bags of florist's off-cuts - I've been laying them on to the SE quarter of the bed as a mulch, together with the guinea pig bedding: You can see it on the left of the photo, with the riddled area, sown with WFBs, to the right. As a method of weed control, it seems to be working, in as much as raking a section clear reveals good loamy earth beneath. That whole area is thickly mulched now, down away to the left, (north), past the area of old greenhouse foundations.