Gardener's Delight?

All animals are a tube surrounded or contained by a wide variety of outward structures. The outer structures protect the inner tube and its bits. The food - whatever that is - goes in at one end (we usually call this the front end) and is excreted at the other (back) end, having had all its goodness extracted in its  process through the tube. Some animals - like earthworms - excrete all their waste in one lump, a worm-cast. Others, like birds, excrete the solid matter first and then the liquid matter on top, hence the white topping to bird droppings. I don't think birds have separate exits for solid or liquid waste. We, and many other animals, excrete solid and liquid waste separately. In all cases  the amount excreted is directly in proportion to the intake of food. The more you eat, the more you excrete. No problems so far? Good. Then I'll move on to the next paragraph.

Big animals need a lot of food.  If you have ever kept hamsters or budgies pretending that they are your children's pets, you will know that they eat very little. A cat eats more and a dog even more. Mind you, my point could be made simply by talking about how much a toy dog eats compared to a Great Dane. Elephants eat huge amounts of food - leaves, branches, grass - in order to keep  going. They also drink a lot of water at the same time as they play with mud at waterholes. OK. They plaster mud on themselves to protect from the sun. Primitive sunblock, I suppose. (But no human would ever buy it.) The point is that the more an animal eats, the more it excretes. Obvious, I suppose. But it's still surprising when you see an elephant pee. There is probably enough warm liquid for at least one bath in an  elephant pee. According to Michell Symons Diary 2010 elephants excrete 20 kgs of dung every day. Or 7,300 kg (7.3 tonnes) a year. No doubt a gardener would be pleased to get their hands on this stuff once it was well-rotted. But pity the poor zoo keeper who has to shovel it all up every day. 20kg of elephant dung is the better part of a wheelbarrow full.

Big numbers lie!

If you walk on sand dunes or a beach above high water mark in a strong wind you find the experience most uncomfortable, if not unpleasant. Particles of sand are whipped up and painfully lash the exposed parts of your body, in particular, your face. This also happens in deserts, if you ever happen to find yourself in one. And in finely cultivated fields when the surface has dried out. Since most of you are generally not in these situations, you rarely have experienced such an event  Except when you are measuring the location of sand dunes which do move over time thanks to the wind and, perhaps, Spring Tides.

Now, there is an astounding fact to be found in Michell Symons Diary 2010. Did you know that 2,000 pounds of space dust and other debris lands on the Earth every day? I thought not. It's a staggering 909.1 kg for the metrically inclined. Or 331,818.2 kg per year. This sounds an awful lot of stuff which would form an enormous pile if it were all in one place. But I suppose it falls roughly evenly over the whole of our planet. The Earth's area is 510,072,000 square kilometres. This means that 0.0065 kg (6,5 grams) of the stuff falls on 1 square kilometre per year. Let's say I occupy 1 square metre. Because 1 square kilometre contains 1,000,000 square metres, that means it would hold that many people. So 6.5 grams of space dust falls on 1,000,000 people. Each of these people gets bashed on the head by 0.0000065 grams of debris every year. And even less per day. My calculator can't/won't do the calculation of 0.0000065/365 grams per day. (My calculator was bought for £1.50 in 1988 and has not been updated. Is it a museum piece?)

So the number that started out sounding pretty impressive, turns out to be nothing to worry about after all. Always work out what impressive sounding figures mean. Especially if they come from politicians of all stripes.

Penshurst Parkland in the snow

I thought I ought to show you what I was talking about at the end of December. Christmas and New Year intervened to interrupt, I'm afraid. However, I'm back. I'll start with a photo taken about a mile away from Penshurst Place to give you the lie of the land.

The feature on the left is the Lancup Well, an ancient small lake. Beyond the three trees in the middle ground is the snow-covered  cricket pavilion.

With luck you will see the trees on the right which form a small wood near the camera and an avenue going towards the house after that. The Lancup Well is again on the left with, beyond it, another avenue of trees.

Here is one of the avenues showing both new replanting on the right and some on the left, together with the old planting on the left. The strange object towards the bottom of the slope is a World War II Pill Box (Grade II Listed).

In the Autumn I photographed some of the trees here. I'm afraid I couldn't resist them.

In the foreground is all that remains of what was once a magnificent tree for children to climb. Unfortunately it got burned down (?by accident) once it became too dangerous. Beyond are the colours of a young avenue.

The Ash tree standing tall has sheltered me and the dog from rain more than once.

I've mentioned the Bear Oak in an earlier blog. Here the beast is. You can see that I wasn't exaggerating when I described its derelict state.

Sanitation connected

Toilets of one form or another have always been a crucial element of domestic design. You don't want to eat and sleep where you crap, do you? Or I don't think so. Let me know if you know different. For nearly all the time we have had toilets they have been outside the living area. For obvious reasons (see above). However, we tended to use cess pits or piles where the stuff could be collected and carted off to be spread on farmers' fields as fertiliser. Never waste good fertiliser when it's cheap. Things changed in the mid 19th century.

Then the water closet was invented. I don't care whether it was Thomas Crapper who did the deed or not. The swirling beast was invented. It meant that the toilet was brought indoors. Durham City, where I have some knowledge, was no doubt typical of many other towns and cities in the realm. The owners of houses built on one of the city's bridges installed water closets. They worked a treat. The only trouble was that the outshot was not a treat for passers-by as the water closets simply emptied their contents down the face of the bridge pier. The resultant stinking, clinging mass was only removed in the winter when the River Wear flooded.

Away from the bridge, other well-to-do residents of the City also installed fashionable water closets. In one part of the town they instructed the installers of the water closets (plumbers?)  to lead the discharge beyond the end of their back gardens in pipes. They didn't care what happened after then. The result was that Durham Racecourse got waterlogged - or should that be shit-logged? - and led to complaints. Eventually, after inspections by the Board of Health, mains sewers were installed throughout the City. Householders were required to connect their houses to the mains at their own expense.

What has led to this fertile discussion? An entry in Michell Symons 2010 Diary which says that Most toilets flush in E flat.</