Decidedly warmer today, although it did get very cold towards twilight.  I got down to the allotment about 9:30 and there were quite a few people working on their plots already.  I chatted to Tony and he said that I had missed the annual general meeting of the allotment society.  Well it seems that there is going to be no change and the allotments are going to be run by the same person.  It is a shame that the committee does not have a look in.   I wanted to complain about the bonfire being lit on the car park.  but that is for another time.

I moved all the slabs on the top bed squaring it off quite well.  I went on to moving the path slabs and that took a little more time.  I am taking out the top soil under the path and putting it on the beans and sweet pea bed.  I am replacing it with a mixture of stones and subsoil.  I am digging a big hole to get the subsoil out and then filling it up to the top of the subsoil part with laylandii shreddings.  I got to the raspberries and took two of them out.  I put them back in immediately down with the other raspberries giving them a dose of mychorrhizal fungi.  I  will  not give any of the others mychorrhiza because they may be infected through these ones .  I hope that I will be able to move them all this March.  The holes under the path were filled with the old greenhouse foundations.  Remember that they are there Tone because I don’t want to be digging that lot up again.  I took the old angle iron that used to be the children’s swing down to the gate for the rag and bone man to pick up next time he passes.  When I picked one of the slabs up, it was covered in about 15 little black keel slugs.  I took them off  and put them in the wild area on the allotment.  There were a few hiding in the raspberries too.  These all went too.  I think that if I get rid of these pests as soon as I see them, it will make gardening this year a little easier.

While I can understand the agonizing that many of us undergo when attempting to produce food that is grown with as few human made chemicals as possible, we must be reasonable. Ferric phosphate FePO4 is indeed an inorganic chemical. All this means in chemical terms is that it does not contain carbon. The confusion comes when we apply the term organic to biological systems. Organic in biology means related to life or organisms. If we replace the metal iron with the metal calcium in this compound then we get a major component of bones – calcium phosphate which although making bones is an inorganic chemical. Does this mean that the strict advocate of organic gardening should not use blood fish and bone as a fertilizer? Now I would rather not use ferric phosphate as a slug and snail killer because I would rather remove as many as I can by hand – gloved if possible. There is little evidence about the effect that ferric phosphate has on other soil organisms and is probably best avoided if you are trying to be organic – as in the biological meaning of the word. Beer contains organic chemicals. You could use this as a trap because slugs and snails seem to be attracted to it. Beer is a man made chemical mix though.

It started to rain  and the slabs got a little sticky.  They are blooming heavy and I didn’t want one to land on my foot.  Still it is a good job nearly done.  Now I say that when you begin to feel uncomfortable gardening because of the rain or the cold or both, then it is time to jack it in and go home.  I hate it when the water from my water proof jacket drips onto my trousers.  I am having to wear jeans too because my garden cord trousers have given up the ghost and been put on the compost to rot down.  Jeans are very hard wearing trousers, however they were never designed for a cold wet climate.  Every time they get wet, the wind whistles through them as if I had nothing on.

I picked some of the brussels and parsnips.  I was going to take some leeks but I don’t think that they are worth the trouble.  I didn’t get the  calabrese out and I should have done.  never mind.  I think either the fox or the badger is back.  They have made some big holes looking for worms in the strawberry bed.  I tidied this up.

I just had picked the vegetables when the light went.  I think that it started to rain a little harder when I got home.  I did not use any of the vegetables - had a cheese and onion pie.  I will do the vegetables tomorrow morning. Ok, I am going to celebrate because this is my 160 post on this blog and 112111 people  have viewed it.

I don’t know why I have been putting off getting the seeds this year.  It just does not seem to be the weather for thinking about seeds.    Still I have got to do it and now seems to be a good time because it is nearly March and seed sowing time in the greenhouse.

Potatoes will be Kestrel

Brassicas

Calabrese  Zen Calabrese - Green spring

Cabbage

Cauliflower - Winter aalsmeer

Broccoli - Redhead

Brussel sprouts - Revenge/Trafalgar

Runner bean - Aintree/Red Rum

Broad bean - Bunyards Exhibition

French bean - Tendergreen

French climbing bean - Cobra

Pea Early - Onward and Hurst Green Shaft.

Beetroot - Boltardy.

Carrot - Flyaway

Courgette - Defender/Soleil

Summer Onions - Sturton sets

Shallots

Leeks - Autumn Giant Goliath

Lettuce - Chartwell/Iceberg

Cucumber - Burpless Tasty Green/County Fair (organic)

Pumpkin - Big Max.

Parsnip - Gladiator

Rhubarb

Scorzonera

Spinach - Medania

Sweet Corn - Two Sweeter/Northern Extra Sweet.

Swede - Marian

Rocket

American land cress

Chard.

Not sure of the varieties I am going to get for some of these vegetables.  I am going to go for ones that are more pest resistant, however I do have my favourites. I have probably forgotten something but I don’t know what…

It would seem that if you add crushed charcoal to soil with other organic material such as manure, blood fish and bone,  compost or comfrey there is a quicker breakdown of this added organic matter and it is rapidly incorporated into soil in a stable organo-mineral particle.  From what I have read, a great deal more of the added organic matter is stabilised in this way than in charcoal free soil where the added organic material would either be mineralised to carbon dioxide or leached from the soil.

It seems that once stabilisation has been achieved there is a very slow breakdown of the organic material, which will give fertility to the soil for many years.

There also seems to be a much greater population of microbes in charcoal enhanced soils probably because the charcoal gives the micro-organisms a habitat - somewhere to live - without being eaten by something else.   The strange thing is that, although there are more microbes living in charcoal enhanced soil, there seems to be less carbon dioxide produced due to respiration.  In other words much more carbon can be sequestered (kept) in the soil with the aid of added charcoal than without.

I would suggest that a greater population of micro organisms in the soil would indicate a more healthy soil.  One which is in better balance and can sustain fertility over a number of years.  The fertility of my allotment has been maintained at the cost of adding a great deal of organic material.  How long this stays in the soil is debatable because I do  not manure every bed each year.  Over time and different cropping regimes there is an obvious need in some years to add significant amounts of organic matter.  Having a method of increasing the fertility while reducing the cost of adding significant amounts of organic matter would certainly make the cultivation of allotments much more economic.

If organic matter is added to ordinary soil without the charcoal then its conversion to carbon dioxide is relatively quick and enhanced.

Not only does charcoal seem to enable added organic matter to be stabilised in the soil, it is a form of carbon itself and would increase the amount of carbon in the soil.  In addition this form of carbon seems to be very long lasting.  From archeological sites and  investigation of Amazonian black earths this is measured in hundreds if not thousands of years.

Charcoal  significantly increases the fertility of the soil, it seems to  enhance the soils microbe population and possibly health and finally it also augments the ability of the soil to store carbon.

Having said all of this, I would not add neat charcoal.  I am going to add a crushed charcoal powder blood, fish and bone mix.  I am going to do this in a 1:1 ratio to begin with.  I am also going to soak crushed charcoal powder in comfrey liquid and then let it dry to a powder again before putting on the ground.

There is some evidence that neat charcoal will reduce the fertility of the soil by enabling organic material to be mineralised - changed to carbon dioxide or by absorbing or adsorbing nutrient molecules so they are unavailable to plant roots.   If the charcoal is first mixed with fertilisers like comfrey and blood fish and bone or even mixed with ordinary compost, then the charcoal will become saturated and not take nutrients from the soil.  Or that’s my theory anyway.

Now I asked a few days ago if  terra preta was just a characteristic of Amazonian soils depending on a tropical climate.  However there is evidence that there is low decomposition rates of charcoal in virtually all circumstances regardless of climate. “Our data from a wide range of climatic conditions and soils further suggests that such biochar [charcoal] applications may be effective in increasing soil organic carbon in many different geographic regions.”

And so to wormeries.  I think you should add worms to your soil rather than to a bin of compost.  However, I do add tiger worms both Eisenia veneta and Eisenia fetida to my compost bins.  They are breeding very well in my darlek bin at home.

Do I think that wormeries are worthwhile?  Bit time wasting really.  I like the idea of compost juice being used rather than it just leaching into the soil around the compost bin but to work hard at collecting it seems not to be worth while when you are working full time and cannot spend the time at the allotment doing this kind of luxury activity.

I have a large number of Lumbricus terrestris and Aporrectodea longa on the allotment and they do a lot of good work.  Deeper down I have Octolasion cyaneum.  They all look after themselves and according to Darwin will turn over the soil very effectively while producing good humus.  Now to link this in with Terra Preta and the use of charcoal, the research says that the charcoal particles should be quite small so that they can be processed by worms.  The fact that they are passing through the body of the worm and interacting with worm faeces seems to enhance the effect of charcoal on the soil.  I can give you research references for all of this if you want them.

It was snowing today so, apart from picking some brussel sprouts and leeks, I did not do anything on the allotment.

I’ve seen on a website that a so called expert said that adding animal manures to the soil was dangerous because  bacteria like E. coli could infect the soil.  Splashes of soil onto plants would then infect the plants causing illness when they are eaten.  Well, I should have died years ago then.  I have been eating vegetables from soil fertilised by animal manure since I was weaned.  I am sure that there are a lot of perfectly healthy people  that have lived in the eons before me that have eaten vegetables grown in this way too.

The problem is that people used to the sterilised, vacuum packed, plastic coated vegetables from  supermarkets are not used to washing their food thoroughly -or cooking it properly.  One of the best ways of adding organic matter, that is in a form readily available to be mineralised (changed into nutrients), is in the form of cow, horse, pig, goat and sheep manure.  While I am a vegetarian, I am not a vegan.  Which is a bit like saying that you support the liberal democrat party -sitting on the fence between labour and conservative. So I do not object to using animal manures.

I am not sure of why vegans do not like to use animal manure.  The animals were not harmed when they were producing it.

You can see I have put fresh horse manure around the blackcurrent bushes.

The heap of soil indicates  where I am doing the Montezuma digging. There is also annual grazing rye and tares green manure ready to be dug in in the Spring.  This is where I am going to grow the runner beans and the sweet peas.  As you can see the garlic and the winter onions have suffered a little with this hard winter.  Particularly up here on the top of the hill.  The slope is north facing too and I always say anyone who can garden successfully on Wakey Hill is a blooming good gardener.

So the next question is: “Can you put fresh manure on the soil and can you dig fresh manure in?”  Well I have as you can see here.  I have used it around the blackcurrents, like this, for over 15 years now.  So much so that the blackcurrents have roots growing out of their branches and these are exposed when the manure has rotted away.  So frankly, I think that this is another of the great misconceptions about gardening.  I have always dug in fresh manure this time of the year.  Leaving manure in a pile to leach out all the nutrients seems completely ridiculous to me.  However, what works for me will not necessarily work for anyone else.  Therefore, I will be digging in fresh manure for the potatoes and last year when I did this I got a good crop regardless of the aminopyuralid herbicide contamination.

In the above photograph you can see the laylandii that we cut back last year because it was growing throught the fence.   This is the laylandii that I burried in the bottom allotment.

 

It is somewhere underneath the grass green manure on this plot. It grew some really good peas last year.    I am getting a really good crop of tight brussel sprouts off the plants in the background.  The plants are about half the size they  are on the rest of the allotment but why should  I bother.  You might not be able to see that the soil is completely different colour to that of the rest of the allotment.  This was were the council replaced the original soil contaminated with benzo(a)pyrene with soil that seemed to us to be subsoil.  Evidently soil that farmers and council employees think is top soil, allotmenteers would regard as subsoil.  Still I added a lot of organic matter and sieved topsoil and removed about ten barrow loads of big stone and is now amost acceptable.  It is quite a large area to try to improve particularly as it is so infertile.  The brussel sprouts seem to have liked the heaviness of this soil and I hope that the winter cauliflowers do half as well.

The allotment looks very untidy this time of year. Particularly so because of the weather.  It is preventing me from getting on.

I saved that trellising from the bonfire.  I am going to pin it to the shed and grow black berries up it.   That will be the job after I finish off squaring up the top bed.

 

You can just about see the slabs along the path on the left hand side.  This is the task I am on now.  I need to square up this bed.  I will take out all the upright slabs and move them over towards the bay tree.  This will make a 14 ft wide bed.  The corner with the bay tree in is where Bill’s, Beryl’s and my allotments meet.   I grew that bay tree from a cutting!!  I will try an take off the suckers and grow them on to make new plants.  This is the rye grass that I am experimenting with to see if it is an effective green manure.  I put the seed in very late last year so it has not grown very much.  It will be dug in at the end of March probably during the Easter holidays.  I don’t want to dig this plot very much this year because I will be putting the brassicas here.  I will just fork in the green manure.

 

 I have used slabs to retain the soil on the allotment.  I don’t do raised beds - I do raised allotments.  You can see my mixing cone of soil where I am doing the Montezuma digging.  That is finished now and I have levelled it out.  The plot in the foreground will be for potatoes.  I may double dig this plot too.  The pile of soil in the foreground is some turf “top soil” that Phil has left me.  I have put most of this on the bottom plot around the brussel sprouts.  It is all grist to the mill…  The allotment does look untidy but it always does at this time of the year.  What can I say.  It would look a lot better if it would stop snowing so that I could get on and tidy it up a bit more.

As you can see, I have dug down three spits so that I can fill the trench with brush and shredded material.  You can see the green manure in the background and some of the shallots and winter onions.  As I dug out each spit I mixed the soil using soil cone heaps.  This was the area where the apple tree was and I have not dug down this far for over 15 years.  However, I must have dug down here in the past because I found two of my old sandles at the bottom of the trench.  There was also some unrotted sawdust horse manure and leaves that I must have burried a long time ago.  This shows that carbon can be sequested in the soil for a long time.  Behind the spade and fork you can see the brushwood from the silver birch trees I buried here.  And if you are wondering where the apple tree is, that’s under there too.  I dug down another spit with the fork but I didn’t take this soil out of the trench.  I was able to put four barrowloads of shreddings into  the trench.

    

  As you can see it is mostly laylandii.  Most people would avoid using this on their allotment because it has such a bad reputation for making the soil acid and incapable of growing anything.  This far down though, I don’t think that it will have any effect on the top soil.  It will help me to keep the soil drained though.

    

After filling the trench I put back the third spit soil mixing it thoroughly with itself.  Next, I put two or three barrowloads of leaves in the trench.

The second spit soil goes in next and finally the top soil.  You can see the soil heap cone that I have used to mix the soil with itself.  I level out the soil afterwards.  And that is all there is to it.

For a few years now I have not been seriously digging.  When I took over the bottom half there was a lot of water running on it from the springs so I had to do some serious drainage.  The best way I have found of draining the allotment is to dig down about three spits and then to add lots of brushwood, shreddings and even logs.  This seems to keep the soil open and allow water to pass through the soil without coming to the surface.  It seems to have worked very well because there is no water on the bottom half although there is a stream flowing down the trackway next to the allotment.  Since I did this last year, I found that mixing the soil seems to have increased the yield from this part of the allotment.  I had four rows of Early Onward peas that had a fairly remarkable crop.  We still have margarine tubs full of them now.

I repeated the exercise in November last year burying a rambling rose from one of the houses that back on to my allotment.  It was seriously taking over the trackway.  I cut it back and buried it so I am hoping that this will aid in the drainage too.  I did not dig a small area by the shed because there were still some of the annual flowers flowering.  Now that they have well and truely died, I will dig these in and try to raise the allotment here to the same height as the rest of this area.  I will probably use some of the brushwood and shreddings  to do this but make sure they are buried very deep down.  This is the exact place where the water was running across the allotment all of last winter.  There is absolutely no water at all this year, however I still want to raise the ground about another 30 cm. if I can.  I have to be careful not to bank up the soil onto the shed though.  It will only encourage it to rot.

I have painted the shed with Cuprinol or whatever it is called.  I didn’t buy it.  It was given to me.  Well, I have painted it on the shed about three times and I still have half a can left.  I am blowed if I am going to throw it away.  It is a nasty old chemical and would only pollute the world.  I will continue to paint the shed  until it all goes.  I may well paint the bean sticks and the poles holding up the wires for the raspberries.   I still haven’t moved the raspberries from the top half to the bottom half.  This is starting to irritate me because it is getting a little late to start moving raspberries.  I will have to do it though because I have planned to grow runner beans where the raspberries are now.  I have already moved the large water butt although in the move it developed a big crack in the bottom and is now useless.  I will use it to store things in and get another bigger one.

On the top of the allotment, I usually just hoe the few weeds off and cultivate the top couple of centimeters with a claw cultivator and then plant into that without digging.   This year though I will dig quite a lot of the allotment.  I am going to dig in the green manure and possibly add a lot of leaves or other organic matter depending on what people leave in the bins by the gate.  I hope the bloke with the shire horses brings another big load of horse manure.  No matter what is in it,  it is all grist to the mill; particularly three spits down.

So, do I do a no dig system or do I begin to double and triple dig again?  I might just run out of time and have to revert to no dig.  The brassicas  like to have a firm soil to grow in.  I think that this may help to deter the cabbage root fly ( Delia radicum ).  So I am not too worried if I cannot dig  the brassica area over.  I have not walked on it since I took the beans and the sweetpeas down last year, so the worms would have had time to soften it up a bit.  Going over it with a hoe, claw cultivator and rake will be good enough to prepare it.  I will also be liming this area I think.  It has not had lime on it for about four years now.  A good liming will help  to prevent club root (Plasmodiophora brassicae.)  I keep to a strict rotation and it has been about four years since I grew brassicas  on this part of the allotment.  Now  that I have the bottom half, I will be able to have a six year rotation.  It makes rotation much easier if each of the beds were equal in size.  This is why I am moving the slabs on the top allotment and making it exactly the same size as the other beds.  I will also relay the path to the tap, taking out the topsoil and replacing it with stones to make a soak away under the path.

This should even things up so that I do not have those irritating little areas where it is not worth planting anything.

I will  have to find somewhere good to plant my viburnum because it is just where I will be altering the path.  There are a lot of bulbs there too which will have to be moved.

This reminds me.  I need to take down the large plastic bags to put my old brassicas in to bring home and put into the green bin.  I should not have left the stumps in the ground because it encourages Plasmodiophora brassicae to spread throughout the soil.  I think that spores from this fungi can stay in the soil for a number of years and it is a devil of a job removing it from a planting area.    I have been fairly successful in keeping it off the allotment until this year.  I have found that the new soil that the council bought has club root in it.  I just hope that it does not spread through the rest of the allotment.

I don’t burn the stumps.  I really don’t think that a damp, smoky, foul smelling fire will be good enough to kill off club root spores. So taking them home to put in the green recycling bin is the best option for me.

Mixing the soil through digging seems to be effective in distributing and reestablishing nutrients from lower in the soil towards the top.  No  dig might be alright for a few years but I think that a jolly good digging once in a while would increase yields - especially after twenty eight years of continuous cultivation.

I am still getting really good crops off the allotment though so I can’t  be getting a lot wrong…

Got down to the allotment around 11 ish and started on the winter digging right away.  I dug a trench four spade widths across and three spits down.  I wanted to bury some of the shredded laylandii.  It is not just laylandii; it is also other woody material however it is mostly laylandii.

Dug the trench out fairly quickly now that I have a system for putting the soil where I know which spit it has come from.  Topmost in front of me on the dug soil, next spit on the left side on undug soil and the final spit gets put on the end on the left too. Even at this depth the soil did not really look any different to the top soil so I have to be careful to replace the soil in the correct order. The bottom of the trench got a good forking over.  I got four barrow loads of shreddings and put them at the bottom of the trench.  I make sure that I meet up with the shreddings that I put into previous trenches by cutting the soil right back to the previous trench.

I covered this with the third spit soil using the cone piles method of mixing.  I build up a cone of soil when I am replacing soil in the trench.  It was the way that I was taught to mix soils at the Glasshouse and Crops Research Institute when I was working in the glasshouses there.  The main reason for digging like this is to mix the soil completely so that nutrients are fairly well distributed throughout the soil.

I leveled out the mixing cones of soil in the trench and then went to get some leaves.  Two barrow fulls of leaves were put into the trench and then covered first with second spit soil and then with first spit soil.  It left a bit of bump in the soil and I have taken my rake home to make some new lawns so I could not level it out very well.  I could have used the claw but I wanted to carry on with the digging.  I did the same procedure three times which I felt was quite good going particularly as the shreddings and leaves were so far away and I had to wheel barrow them up the hill.

Yesterday, I picked some Brussel sprouts, dug up some leeks and parsnips, took them home, washed them and had them cooked for tea.  They tasted really good.

I really do not know how people can eat Brussel sprouts any other way.  They taste foul if left for even one or two days.

 Not more on terra preta Tone!!!!

I was thinking, if the terra preta is reliant on Amazonian or rain forest species of fungi and earth worm, would we be able to replicate this kind of soil in our temperate climate?

Will we just be a poor copy of the soil in the rain forests or is there a possibility that this soil is replicable. We would have to substitute fungi and earthworm for those that can survive the temperate climate.

If we can then this is a remarkable resource that can be carried around the world. If not then whoever is attempting to make terra preta – and the Germans seem to be ahead of the pack in this department – is doomed to failure.

I think that increasing fertility of soil with the use of charcoal may be as far as we can go…

Here is a good reminisce. My allotment on 2nd February 1982 just after I had taken it over. I had cleared and dug almost half of the allotment.  You can see I am skim digging.  The weeds that I have skimmed off were buried in the trench.  I took out a spit deep of subsoil, left it on the trackway and put in the weeds.  I took out a spit deep of subsoil further on in the trench and covered the weeds leaving a hole which was filled with weeds.  This is carried on until the end of the trench when I fetched the subsoil on the trackway and covered the weeds at the end of the trench.

  

February 1982                                                                                                                                                 From a similar viewpoint February 2010

The view from the other end.

   

 

And the soil in February 1982.  This is a typical stagnogley soil with clay enriched subsoil.  This type of soil has reduced Iron II compounds because waterlogged soils do not let air flow through them very well.  Iron II (Fe²⁺) compounds are grey or bluey grey in colour.  As this was a less permeable heavy clay and waterlogged soil,  it is grey although there is some oxidation where air has managed to get into the soil and this is where it has a mottled reddish brown colour.  This soil profile is called a Bg horizon.

Needless to say that it is not like this now.  As you can see, the bluey grey Iron II soil has been replaced by a more homogenous brown colour soil and there is obvious signs of organic matter even at the third spit - 90cm level.  With oxygen from the air the iron compounds give the soil a brown colour.  So soils that are free draining, open and porous tend to be redish brown. I think that I have won the water logging battle in this area of the allotment.

Also known as Amazonian Dark Earths. After watching The secrets of El Dorado on http://topdocumentaryfilms.com/secret-el-dorado,  I now have a new project.  I want to begin to work on developing ADE on my allotment.  It is not just down to charcoal though.  There is a complex interaction between charcoal, nutrients, organic matter and mychorrihzal fungi. I have to thank Uriel 13 for putting me onto this.  His suggestion is that it is not mychorrhizal fungi but yeast that is important in producing this kind of soil.  He is suggesting sour dough yeast.

Whether it is mychorrhizal fungi or not, yeast is another avenue to follow.  I don’t know where to get sour dough yeast from, however my local garden centre sells mychorrhizal fung.
As to producing my own charcoal, I think that I am going to experiment with various commercial charcoals first and I am going to mix them with blood fish and bone in a solution of undiluted comfrey liquid to start with.  I am  going to dry the resulting mixture to produce a powder because this will be easier to mix evenly though the top soil.

I have a particularly infertile area of soil on the allotment, (If you want to know why look on my allotment blog under benzo (a) pyrene).  I am going to set up a proper comparison plot with several sections.  Another problem is what proportions should be used to make the most efficient soil additive.  I am going on the assumption that it is the adsorbsion of nutrient into the charcoal that is the inportant factor.  Also the provision of micro habitats for bacteria and fungi may be important.  The provision of very small crevices within the charcoal may prevent predation by other microorganisms.   As yeasts can be very small, as other fungi, they may find a sanctuary within the charcoals labyrinth. The trial plots will be:

• One with charcoal on its own,one with blood fish and bone on its own,
• one with comfrey on its own,
• one with blood fish and bone and comfrey
• one with comfrey and charcoal
• and finally one with all.
• I would like to check out fungi as well, however that might make it complicated :-)).

I will  grow peas on the different plots.  They may confuse the issue because they have nitrogen fixing bacteria in their roots, however it will be the same for all plots and that is my rotation so get over it…
Trying to think of ways that the soil remake itself may not be too problematic.  The increase in microorganisms within such a fertile soil may cause it, if they are produced in enough numbers.  Any nutrient from decomposition seems to be adsorped by the charcoal and this also gives soil fungi a really good habitat.  Together with an increase in the population of roots and leaf litter from above ground you are very likely to get an increase in volume of soil.

If the film’s suggestion is correct and the plots are set up like the ones reported then I should get enough information to convince myself of the value of this method of soil management.  I doubt very much whether it is properly scientific, however it is good fun.