Why I Oughta...

A few weeks ago, I posted a couple of items related to my 2024 goal of building a wood-fired pizza oven in our backyard including a look at a couple of locations , some brickwork inspiration and how I could build the stand out of cinder blocks - including corners .   With the snow melting away this week, I went out to look at one of the locations and remembered...that ahead of the snow, I was digging around trying to find the 'edges' of the drywell.   Below is a photo showing a number of locations that I dug down to see 'how deep' the drywell is located and how I was probing to find the 'edge' of the well.   The drop from grade to drywell is variable across this six-foot-by-six-foot section.  Surprisingly so.  I also found (I think) two of the 'edges' of the drywell.  Which...if I sited the oven where I *wanted* to, would have a small portion of the foundation OVERHANGING the drywell.  That would mean that I'd have to bring in some gra...

Number 6 (#6) on my 2020 To-Do list in the garden this year was to add some passive aeration mechanism in our compost bin setup in the backyard.   I have a three-bin setup (one active bin, one carbon storage bin, one nitrogen storage bin) and a 50 gallon tumbler.  Last Fall, the active bin (on the left) was about half-full and I was storing the excess leaves in the carbon storage bin (middle) . Earlier this year, I posted some discussion about various passive compost aeration techniques - including one design with vertically installed pvc pipes and another with horizontally inserted perforated pipes.    After poking around on the Web, I decided to go with 10' sections of 2" perforated PVC pipe inserted horizontally in the pile.  My bins are 3' x 3', so I cut down 6 40" sections.   Then, I grabbed my garden fork and started to dig out the active bin of compost to get the volume low enough to install the pipes at a level that would ma...