Friday 28th March 2025

Another beautifully warm day for nature club and it was time to tackle the compost.  We took it from the bottom, because this is where it has decayed most.  A lot of fun was had manoeuvring the wheelbarrow and loading up the bags.  It didn’t smell, (although the air was thick with the muck spreading in  the fields), but it did have some centipedes and millipedes in it. We used it to dress the fruit trees again, which all have blossom about to open.  The children spotted the glorious Japanese cherry in full bloom in the car park and we talked about how we are looking forward to our native cherries in the field flowering and bearing fruit, as the blossom smells so strongly of almond (whereas the Japanese one has no scent). We discussed why soil is so vital and they mentioned nutrients and moisture.  They weren’t sure what the nutrients were and possibly thought that it was different for plants and animals compared to humans.  It is true that we all need different quantities of certain chemicals, but as we are in a food chain, the quality of the soil dictates the quality of the food we also consume.  The three main nutrients in the soil are Nitrogen, Phosphorous and Potassium, then calcium, magnesium and sulphur, which humans also have as well as several others. They were also able to tell me that insects break down the compost, which got us on to detritivores-creatures which feed on rotting matter.  Finally, we discovered that one teaspoon of soil contains 50 billion microbes on average!  Of course, we couldn’t see them.  We started to fill the pond and water the plants, as we haven’t had much rain lately, but we ran out of time.