Digging Done

We finished all the digging! As well as digging up the lawn, we also added some new top soil to the beds. This is a picture of it in front of our garage. We had to use a wheelbarrow to move it all into the back garden. This soil is half soil and half compost so it will provide lots of nutrients for the plants.

I have planted garlic, onion, spinach and pea seeds outside so far. I have also planted cauliflowers inside. I am also chitting some potatoes. This means that I am leaving some potatoes in the sun, inside so they are warm, to encourage them to sprout shoots. You might see this happen if you have had some potatoes in your kitchen for some time. Hopefully, this will mean lots of delicious vegetables later in the year. This is a picture of the finished beds. You can just about make out pieces of string which show where I planted the seeds.

I have covered some of the soil with boards. This covers some of the area where I haven't planted seeds and should help stop any weeds from growing.

Digging begins

With some help from my parents, we dug up the plants that were in the wrong place in the garden and put them into pots or planted them in the chicken coop. When we get some chickens this will give them an interesting environment to live in.

Nick cut up some wood and made a raised bed where two vegetable plot will be.

While digging, we found that the soil in our garden isn't very deep. Underneath the soil there is a layer of hard-core, stones and bricks, that the vegetable won't be able to grow through.

This means that I can't grow long root vegetables like carrots and parsnips.

We are going to build two more raised beds, but we have to remove the grass first.

New home, new garden

Recently, Nick and I moved to a new house and we now have our own garden. I have decided I want to grow my own vegetables. At the moment it has an area with plant and a big lawn as well as a shed and a chicken coop! I need more plots for planting my vegetables. So I drew plan of what I wanted the garden to look like

Then I measured it out in the garden and marked it out string

 

Now I will have to do a lot of digging! I will let you know how I get on.

Projectile Pooing of Penguins

Some scientists have worked out how much pressure is required by penguins to shoot there poo away from their nests, about 60 kilo-pascals. This is about the pressure you would experience if you were swimming 6 meters under water!

This research was published as Pressures produced when penguins pooh - calculations on avian defaecation by Victor Benno Meyer-Rochow and Jozsef Gal in Polar Biology, 2003.

 

Here is a cool video, paper planes flying continuously with the help of fans

Using your dog as a compass

You may have used a compass to find out which way is North. Did you know you can also use a dog? Some scientists have found out that when dogs are doing a poo they preferred to face north or south rather than east or west!

This experiment was published in the article Dogs are sensitive to small variations of the Earth’s magnetic field by Vlastimil Hart et al. in Frontiers of Zoology, 2013

Whirlygig toy = Centrifuge = Life saver

Have you every played with a whirlygig? Or a button spinner?

This simple toy has two handles connected by two pieces of string and a disc in the middle of the string between the two handles. It is then possible to make the disc spin really fast by pulling of the two handles. There are lots of videos of how you can make your own on Youtube, including this one:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UCutHjdDFvY



Some scientists at Stanford University have taken this simple toy and are using it to save lives. In order to work out if a patient has a particular illness, doctors often need to take a sample of blood. Blood is made up of four main components: red blood cells, white blood cells, platelets and plasma. It is necessary to separate the blood into these individual components to identify an illness. To separate these components the blood is spun around really fast. In a lab this is done using a centrifuge, which is very expensive. The scientists at Stanford have shown how this very cheap simple toy can be used to do the same job.



Here is a video showing it in action and the scientists explaining more about what it can do: