Taking The Heat (Off The Planet)

 Beaming Heat Out To Space

Earth's fever is down to two things - One, greenhouse gases, yep. And fossil fuels, two. Both can be argued to be sides of the one coin, and it can also be argued that we're the ones that flipped it.

Fossil Fuels And Warming 

OKAY OKAY I know this is done to death and boring but no - it isn't. Our lives 99% depend on people knowing this, and the young generations' lives will 100% depend on everyone knowing this and being on the same page. Choose your future. . .

Fossil fuels come from . . . well, fossils. The carbon cycle starts when plants use sunlight to split carbon out of CO2 in the air. That carbon is, in effect, the energy that the plant absorbs from the sun, stored as the plant's body. Plants are solar panels that take sunlight and turn it into carbon and are also their own battery, that stores that carbon. 

When an animal eats the vegetation, they're just charging up from a solar battery. When an animal eats another animal, they're charging from a power bank. When animals use the energy they've absorbed, they exhale CO2. Which the next generation of plants crack back to carbon and oxygen using solar energy.

Some plants don't get eaten and die naturally, and they take that carbon-stored solar energy into the soil. And when the animals that 'charged' up by eating other carbon-based stuff die, they take energy into the soil. And basically that's what carbon sequestration is. Burying old solar energy. 

We burn it (in the form of coal and petroleum products) in fires and smelters and steam engines and vehicles and power stations to make electricity, and burning recombines the carbon with oxygen to make CO2. The trouble is that in doing we're doing damage twice. The energy stored in fossil fuels is extra energy - it was buried down deep and its turn to come back to the surface isn't supposed to be up yet. 

And secondly, once CO2 gets aloft in the atmosphere, it traps heat that would normally have been radiated out to space. (In fact, the technologies I'll be mentioning are actually connected to this.) Heat increases, and that's bad because aside from driving planetary temperatures up and making life difficult or downright impossible for various species, there's also a lot more energy being stored in the oceans and the air.

Weather is driven by that heat energy. Each passing day, the overall temperature of everything goes up by a miniscule amount. It might be 0.01C per day or 0.000000001C, but it's currently only going ☝ up. The tiny increments seem ridiculous, but they add up. In the last half a century they've added up to 0.9C, almost a whole degree.

Something like a 0.9C temperature change in a bathtub full of water is only tiny bit of extra energy - but there's a lot more water than that in the oceans, and they're a whole 7,053,400,000,000,000,000 times bigger than a bathtub between them. 

(That's a rough guess, bathtubs contain around 50 gallons, the oceans apparently hold around 352,670,000,000,000,000,000 gallons. It's science. I could work it all out but frankly my eyes are sort of glazing over already.) 

It's enough to say that the oceans gain a lot of heat energy every day. That creates wilder storms, changes wind and water flow patterns, causes droughts and storms and fires - climate disasters just like we're seeing already.

So that's the situation. We can't wind back the centuries, can't put all that CO2 and carbon back without needing even more energy and releasing even more heat. We need to do something - and actually a lot of somethings - to stop this self-reinforcing cycle. What we can do is the topic today.

How To Get The CO2 Out

Power Generating Plant

It's the obvious target isn't it? Just switch off coal and oil fired power stations.

Just for interest, since setting climate targets for decarbonising (stopping the use of fossil fuels and switching to clean sustainable energy and taking tons of carbon out of the atmosphere) we've hit about . . . around about . . . ummm . . . none of them actually. 

So - just switch off coal and oil fired power stations. . .

And replace them . . . with . . . what? That's the problem. Our energy demands keep going up and up as we face hotter weather and so we need more energy-hungry air conditioning, and even though solar farms and wind farms are virtually being thrown up around the world at amazing speed, our energy demand is easily outpacing the rate at which we add capacity.

That's not to say that we should give up. Each new clean energy source we build is another miniscule shift in the right direction. The world gained this energy one miniscule shift at a time, and so this works.

Also, and going back to those oceans: People don't get how BIG the planet is and it takes a lot of energy to shift its overall temperature and will take a lot of effort to shift it back. I'll get back to this a bit further down the article. 

Transportation

So - get all vehicles off the roads then. Replace them with hydrogen and battery electric vehicles. Up goes our energy demand to manufacture those cars, and then after that, up goes demand again to keep those vehicles charged and running. 

(To their credit, EVs charging off the energy grid are still more efficient - and cause less carbon pollution - than combustion engined vehicles,. mile for mile and year for year. But they are still an energy hog.)

I'll tell you that I think one day we'll just lease vehicles on microleases, you want to go somewhere you tap an app, an EV appears, you go to your destination, the vehicle disappears to go drive someone else - no parking fee, no maintenance costs, just Pay As You Go. 

To be balanced, there are also some other problems with this. First you can never keep anything in 'your' car and (fore example) I like to keep a first aid kit, fishing line, and fold up shopping cart plus some solid shopping bags in the car. 

And if the person before you was infectious with, oh, say for argument, something like COVID, then you might become ill. Or if you leave your purse or wallet in that car, you have little hope of getting it back. 

But I firmly believe that not owning a private car will be necessary. Think of the suburbs, how many acres of driveways are there? And on those driveways sit private cars. For 95% of the day, every day. Rusting, dripping the odd oil, but not being used. This means that you could theoretically use 90% fewer cars if we shared them. 

And THAT is why car and fuel companies don't want us to get the sharing EV mindset. They're multiple industries that are currently taking in trillions of dollars - and creating this problem in the first place. They're sitting in the catbird seat, they're successfully taking money from us for fuels and energy and vehicles, and then they're successfully making the recovery our problem so that they don't have to spend any of that hoard. On top of that are whole industries built on top - sales lots, showrooms, garages, petrol stations, and so forth. As I said, it's going to take a LOT to shift the energy equation back into the black.

So, we're seeing adverts for the 'convenience' of owning one or two vehicles apiece, the 'freedom' the vehicles supposedly afford us. 

Some of our biggest generators of CO2 are:

Generating electricity, of course. It's a nice low-hanging fruit that means minimal disruption to our 'convenience-based' way of life. 

Air travel, shipping, road transport, agricultural, mining, and public transport. Getting more problematic.

Personal transport such as cars and RVs and 4WD not used for work purposes, motorcycles and scooters. Difficult choices.

Petrol engined lawn mowers and line trimmers and hedge trimmers and the like. 

There's also a huge amount of materials and work involved in changing all of these over. The ecological cost of digging ever more material up, the energy costs associated with the manufacturing processes. 

How To Get The Heat Out

Aircondition less. Yeah I know it sounds a bit glib and pat, but what if you could get the heat out without needing as much energy? Several technologies are coming to the fray. One is a material that beams heat straight through the atmosphere and out into space. There are two links in the last sentence because it's getting wide recognition and thus it shouldn't be long before we see it able to clear heat to infinity and beeeyooonnnd! as Buzz would say.

The next one generates electricity from heat rather than light, and the developers are seeing it as a way to successfully extract more energy from insolation. (Insolation: the incoming solar radiation.) And that's topnotch because it makes use of more of the solar spectrum and gets more energy out of the same acreage of solar panels.

And there's a third candidate that wants to do a thing I can't help but consider to be somewhat problematic, and that's to 'generate electricity from solar panels at night'. But I hasten to add that I'm just not sure - I don't have all the facts.

Okay - the heat mirrors. They're a bit tricky to make - now. But anything like this starts out tricky, just ask any innovator. The first internal combustion engines were cranky, erratic, and prone to all manner of spectacular failures. A few years later they had more or less reliable cars powered with the technology, and Henry Ford was producing cars en masse not long afterwards. 

So these are mirrors. But it seems from the description that it retransmits the sun's heat back up at a wavelength that is more able to pass through the air without heating it. So that's a bonus, it reflects more heat out than remains behind.

And these mirrors are also a passthrough element. Put heat in and they retransmits that just the same way. Run cooling pipes against the underside, and it'll suck that heat out, cooling whatever you're running in the system. Use it like an alternative to airconditioning, need to use conventional airconditioning less. And as with everything, someone will figure out how to integrate it into airconditioning units directly, leading to multistorey buildings becoming far more efficient. 

Direct rising warm air flwoing up the side of buildings up and under the panels and the heat in that air too will get sent to space and cool air will fall down, cooling the famous 'urban heat islands' that are our cities. 

If every city makes a conscious effort to put as much of the urban landscape and buildings under heat mirrors, they'll use less electricity to keep cool. 

Next, the device that can extract electricity from heat with almost double the efficiency at which solar panels extract electricity from sunlight. These work better at higher temperatures but luckily we already have great heat pumps, and they can concentrate the heat to these devices. 

Moreover, as the article points out, we can easily use solar energy to heat stuff to extreme temperatures already, too. It's the principle behind many of the solar farms you see with a single tower at their centre. If you wanted to store the day's heat in molten salts or some other means, you could run it over these TPV cells and they extract heat, turn it to electricity, and you have a solar power system that runs day and night and through cloudy weather.

Now we come to the one thing I'm not so sure of. I'm fine with recovering waste heat from existing processes. I'm even okay with storing the day's solar energy and using it to do work another time, generating heat in the process. It radiates away during the night, right? And with the heat mirror we can dump some excess heat day and night to balance it out, right? 

So this bit from the article gives me doubts:

"We get energy from the sun — it arrives, it warms up the Earth but then the Earth actually radiates the exact same amount of energy back out into space," he says.

That's a balance, right? And because we have excess heat, we already know the balance has changed - in the wrong direction. So why would we want to capture it and store it instead? I'm just not sure. Maybe the heat mirrors will help me get over this doubt.

Thoughts

We have technology, we have resources. What we don't seem to have is to use some of those resources to fix the planet, for what seem to be quite trivial reasons. Maybe we need a good wake-up call, well what do we call successively hotter temperatures, worse fires, worse storms, worse flooding, worse droughts? What do we need, dammit? 

And that also brings me to another thought. You may have heard of the Fermi Paradox - scientists, faced with the growing proof that life was probably not an isolated and rare phenomenon, wondering why, if so much life must exist, we haven't seen signs of it yet? (For example, meteorites have been found that have life chemicals embedded in them - how much more proof do we need? Are we really so unwilling to accept anything outside our range?)

And that led other scientists to propose that there's a "Great Filter" event that stops life at some critical point of its development. I think we may be at ours. . .

And also, if that's the case, that industrialisation and resource exploitation are the Great Filter, then one way we should be able to identify any planets that have advanced life on them would be to see if they're emitting more heat than they should be. . .

Conclusion

If we don't act, then Great Filter or not, we're pretty much going to be Filtered anyway, within a generation. Any survivors will get thrown back to a level of civilisation that existed several thousand years ago. Albeit a puzzling one with a lot of puzzling things around them. 

Action is called for. YOUR action also. Time to bite the bullet and start making repairs and reparations. I'm happy to start and in fact I've been doing so - reducing my footprint, writing like mad to make people aware, working on means to recycle plastics and other waste materials and keep the out of the waste stream, and writing - did I mention the writing? I do a lot of that, it takes up 75% of my entire week to conceive, research, and write articles.

So please - if you can at all spare some time, take a look at my News Stand where you'll see live updated links to everything I publish; Or take a subscription to my weekly newsletter where you'll receive the same information in your inbox for free; Or contact me via the webform or directly email me; Or donate either directly or at my Ko-Fi page for the price of a coffee, or even make a regular monthly donation there..

Biobots And Plastic Recovery

 

Actually, This Biobot Video May Be The Greatest Thing Ever

The Next Big Thing In Plastic Recovery?

This video shows that RCX-AU may already be outdated, superseded by our ever-advancing technology. Here's what appears to be a fledgling field of biotechnology making organic robots which are for now quite limited, but can round up material, follow paths surprisingly well, or are able to be controlled by external stimuli. 

The bot above is shown (in the video I linked above) pushing an accumulation of stuff in an anticlockwise direction. There's the video of a swarm of them making little piles and donuts of stuff. 

BONUS: If the 'stuff' happens to be a heap of the same kinds of cells as the biobots are composed of, the piles seem to be able to form themselves into copies of the biobot. Not quite birth, but spontaneous automatic self-assembly. 

Their inventors have also given them a 'single-bit memory' that currently causes them to change colour if they encounter particular chemicals, but it's a fair certainty that the scientists will find other useful functions for them to fulfill. I'm not entirely sure it'll be possible but maybe if they throw some biochem AI at it they might find some really interesting uses for biobots:

1. If it can be made selective enough, how about 'bots that turn a particular colour if they bump up against a particular type of plastic like, oh let's say microparticles of PET, HDPE, PP, or PVC? That way a customised batch of bots can be released over an area to highlight all that 'forever' PET by turning orange. Another batch can turn blue in the presence of HDPE, and so on. This kind of precise indication would be important because HDPE is an eminently recyclable plastic. 
2. Just for laughs, that software the people in the video used to design their critters might be able to come up with a design that pushes until the detector protein activates and then close up around or at least attached to the particle as well as marking what type it is by their colour. 
3. If the biobot could also swell when triggered then it would become less dense and float the particle up in a water environment. (Think Pacific Garbage Patch/Gyre)

I say they might find such uses but I'm actually pretty sure that these kinds of things will be reasonably simple with the application of AI to do the biochem scutwork. That's the kind of thing AI excels at, running millions of combinations and iterations, and it's being used to discover potential drug candidates, evolve other AI software, and iterate over physical designs just like the program that currently designs the biobot shapes.

Scaling Up

The next issue I can think of is production of useful quantities of such biobots because at present this work is done by human researchers manually following the software's guidance. What's needed is a lot of tiny micromanipulators that function a bit like our currently available telepresence surgical robots.

TP surgical robots can be operated by a human or a medical surgery program. Scale it right down and strip it down to just the few functions needed for snipping and shaping cells and you can feed the code for a particular 'bot into it over and over. 

Let one surgical program control a dozen or more tiny telesurgery bots and you can start to mass-produce biobots to order. With specific properties to collect specific materials and tag them. 

And for really fast development, the AI that designs the biobots could send the code to a picosurgery unit, have a series of biobots pumped out, and it could even evaluate its own accuracy by using computer vision to observe the products in action, adjust its own algorithms, and so forth. Once you have a design that does what you want, you send that code to a mass-production minifactory.

You can see where that's going, right? Free the scientists to just deciding on useful missions for biobots, let the AI find solutions, let the minifactories generate a batch of specialised biobots. And - just like 3D printers - these minifactories are initially going to be a bit specialised and require laboratory conditions but we develop things fast with the tech we have at our fingertips already.

So it won't be long before it's small and portable enough to be installed on a ship in the Great Garbage Patch and churn out biobots for identifying plastics from near the seafloor, identify what type, and float thew marked particles of it to the surface, and the ship can just skim particular-coloured scum, remove moisture from it, and fill containers with the lovely recyclable plastic. 

A supply vessel would bring out raw materials, rotate shift crews, and take back lots of containers full of lovely recoverable plastic that only needs the biobots washed off it. And old biobots would be a good ingredient in compost or liquefied to make oil or be burned to biochar yielding energy in the process.

Of course you don't need the whole AI setup out on the barge, just the code to make the biobots. And updates to that code can be sent over satellite, mobile network, USB stick, or even radio. New designs could be disseminated in minutes. 

One downside I can immediately think of is to keep active biobots away from pigs - just in case we end up with a 'grey goo' situation in piggeries. And of course there are also nanobots that are made with human muscle tissue as the primary movement element. Luckily there seem to be no recorded attempts to build a new human but the whole grey goo style scenarios will need to be checked for and eliminated.

(Okay - I admit that's a touch far-fetched perhaps, but despite me being an enthusiastic supporter of using clean tech to fix the planet's issues, I am also looking at other possibilities - I for one would prefer to survive, un-gooed. . .)

I'm not saying there's any danger but it always pays to check check and check again, we have a long history of doing half-assed things like introducing rabbits, foxes, and cane toads into a pristine environment... In the current situation, in fact, we have a perfect example of this - for decades we've just gone ahead and made plastic the indispensable cornerstone of industry and commerce, and oh dear - no-one thought about microplastic bits and those near-immortal - yet so eminently disposable - PET drink bottles.

The point is that as I said in the article AI Is Changing The World already, technology and AI are already changing the world, and one useful way they are able to do that is accelerating the speed at which we can go from an idea to turning out finished products in record time. This is especially useful if that technology is useful for cleaning up the environment or eliminating some other dirty technology - and is cleaner than the stuff it's cleaning up.

And one of the best ways AI and this new biotechnology could be applied right now is to the waste problem. For instance - sorting waste into specified categories is currently achieved by a combination of mechanical and human methods and is still far from producing perfect pure stockpiles of recyclable materials. 

But a band of plucky young nano-bio-bots could change all that. Using AI and technology to do the widespread yet tiny scale tasks of finding waste in the wild, corraling it up, sorting it, and bringing it to central waste recovery / recycling facilities is something we have the capabilities right now to achieve. No ifs or buts, these aims are rapidly attainable given a willingness to finance and support them. 

One More - IMPORTANT - Thing To Consider

The Great Garbage Patches in the ocean whirlpools known as the Gyres have been shown to be a bit problematic all of a sudden. Life, it turns out, fills niches - even niches we know next to nothing about even though we literally created them - really quickly. 

The Gyres are apparently teeming with life that's using them as a habitat, and that life has just made itself at home among the garbage. 

It's now becoming a bit of a Catch-22 irony. Clean up all that plastic - and risk scooping up all the neuton (the name for all this microscopic and tiny lifeforms as a group) as bycatch and doing to neuton pretty much as megatrawlers do to larger marine life... 

The article admits that we know very little about these tiny food sources for the larger fish life, but I imagine that before the plastic filled these gyres, they'd have been packed with rafts of neuton, probably not ever seen before as a) they wouldn't be on any major routes and b) quite likely not very visible, possibly even floating mostly under the surface.

And now that we've seen that these gyres are chock full of plastic trash, it's not hard to imagine that this may be one reason the ocean fish stocks are collapsing so quickly - plastic (being light and bulky) displacing neuton and thus depleting an important food resource for the oceans. At least, that makes a lot of sense to me. What do you think? Feel free to use the Contact Me details in the footer.

Once again, even here I imagine these microbiobots could prove helpful IF they can be developed into something that can isolate the plastics only for scooping up. If they could be made to slowly form very large clumps, then those could be harvested with minimal disturbance to the neuton, and so the plastic could be removed relatively slowly and allow the old 

Conclusion

Getting the money is a matter of governments and corporations making funds and resources available. Access to machining, laboratories, and other facilities are the easiest of things for a corporation or government to make available to researchers, and would help save the planet. (It wasn't so long ago that I'd have considered a phrase like that to be hyperbole. Now it's a fact of life that'll be uncomfortably and permanently driven home to us all within the next 2 - 5 years.)

This is why we all need to become activists and publicise and pressure in every way we can to raise awareness and make it happen. I guess you haven't gotten this far without hearing about RCX-AU, an the main purpose of that is to make communities more aware of and open to recycling and themes like this article.

---

As I've been researching this article, one thing has begun to stand out for me - just who publishes what. I see literally thousands of articles by mainstream media outlets that explain how hopeless the problems of sorting, managing, and recycling waste are, how insurmountable and expensive remediation will be. 

You can tell that MSM is driven by corporate policies. Because it IS so much cheaper to dig up new raw materials than it is to actually recover and recycle the waste that's inevitably produced. (Excerpt, of course, the lives of the people at the mine face so to speak, and the lives of the people whose crops and lives are poisoned by the waste or who are themselves directly poisoned by it. But corporations don't have a column in their spreadsheet for something as irrelevant as human lives. . .)

It's easier to wave hands, shrug shoulders, "it's too much for the economy to bear," "it's too hard, insurmountable" and the like. But that's bullshit. There are people out there that have the answers, and all they need is financial and material support.

Here on the other side of the coin are community and public forums, and news and blogging sites like Medium, and blogs like my blogs among others, that aren't beholden to big business bucks, and are telling the stories of how easy it could be if only some effort and money was put into relevant technologies and research. Once you start looking you can find a large - a HUGE - cohort of bloggers and writers and scientists and researchers who are calling bullshit on the huge corporations and showing ways it CAN be done cheaply and efficiently.

I know you can't support all of them. But you could support my suite of blogs and sites - subscribe to the suite newsletter (only one email a week, no flooding your inbox) - or go to the News Stand and see what my other blogs are up to. You could also make a monthly donation on my Ko-Fi.com which is actually a good way to help me keep server fees paid and also let me buy the parts for developing my recycling machines. Or you could just directly Paypal me a donation. 

I've Got Worms - And That's a Good Thing!

 Using Worms In Your Garden

The TEdAWORM garden bed

Our new landlord (as of two and a bit years ago) took over our lease from the old landlord, put up our rent - and then took away 96% of what area we'd had for gardens by splitting the block in half. . . (And please - this isn't a shot at the landlord, who has in fact made everything far more secure and comfortable for us in return.) We had to uplift about 25sqm of raised and in-ground garden beds out of the huge backyard and move six of them into the pocket-handkerchief-sized front courtyard garden, and that 6sqm plus about 2sqm more in between the beds became the new vegetable garden. The other 12sqm or so is our ornamental and relaxing garden. 

We loved our backyard vege garden and always had a few things growing in it for cooking, and now suddenly we were down to a quarter of the space I'd had to make it produce for us. I'm a slightly less than average gardener anyway, which doesn't help - I forget to water on the hottest day and lose a whole crop, I get too unwell to physically get on the ground and pull weeds so they compete with the plants I want, and so this time I've aimed for gardening I can manage and that will produce well for us.

I remembered ages ago reading about keyhole gardens in Lesotho Africa and decided they were ideal with their clever feeder buckets. 

Except.

We had those tiny rectangular 95x85 steel garden beds you can buy at most garden and hardware places for $20 - $40 and at 30cm tall they aren't anywhere near high enough to make a decent Lesotho garden. A real keyhole garden bed should be waist high. So instead I concentrated on the feeding bucket part of the whole thing - and realised I could use that as a starting point for a small worm feeder system for a small raised bed. A system that fed the worms in situ and so bring the worm farm to the garden, so to speak.

This is where my thinking cap hatched the Plan. The feeder section in a keyhole garden is where you drop scraps for the worms, and the worms do the job of eating it, digesting it, and then depositing it around the garden bed in the form of worm poop. It's the central part of how a keyhole bed works - not so much the shape, but the feeder.

I had two problems, the problems were the weed mat (which people say worms have no trouble squeezing through but I was dubious) and how to make a repeatable and reliable worm feeder that looked good enough to be in our living space courtyard.

We had old packing cartons and laid those over the weed mat as a further isolating layer. It breaks down really quickly in the warm moist damp climate and soil here so it would have melted into the soil by now but it did help keep everything in place while we worked.

The problem then was to feed worms, lure them up above the weed mat into the garden bed soil, and be able to close the feeder against evaporation and bright light because worms hate both of those things. There's also the old myth that worms hate vibrations but there's a highway 5m away from the beds and our worms have never heard that particular story and don't care at all even when a big B double semitrailer rig thunders past and makes our windows rattle. Long live the worms! 

Breaking Ground

First we looked at the area we had which was a newly fenced area that had a 45 degree corner for reversing out of the driveway. We made an L shape with equal sides and it took 5 garden beds. (I later added another bed on the end of the arm to the right as a cat toilet but they have other ideas and so now the beds all have to take turns...)

I later abandoned the idea of having uprights and
everything just sits on the ground and doesn't move.

The little Tinkercad sketch I made (above) was all we needed in order to break ground on the project. It was just a rough draft but we bought some big garden sleepers and made it so. Two garden beds sit in each leg, and one in the diagonal section. There's weed mat laid down all throughout. There's a space between the beds in each leg, that we stuck plastic pots in. And there are spaces, one either side of the angled bed, with more pots in.

Once the sleepers (in red) were in place we dropped weedmat all the way around, placed the raised beds in their final positions, then put packing carton cardboard over the mat in each bed. Then two cuts 100mm long and at right angles made in the centre of each bed through the cardboard and the weed mat, a sort of "X marks the spot" for the TEdAWORM Worm Feeders. Only five of the beds got feeders because the last one was meant to be a cat loo. (Yeah, some hope hey?)

Here you can see the
worm feeder placement.

 

A look straight down.

Roughly measured PVC pipe.

Okay - so you can see almost all the elements of the garden beds come together in those four photos. The sleepers forming the overall outline of the garden, the gap between a bed and the next one for pots; then a view down the food chute, and two pictures of the 100mm PVC pipes that the worm feeders are made out of.

There's some amount sticking out above the ground. In my case I used about 20-30cm stuck above the soil, then holes drilled in the pipe from just below the surface of the garden bed's soil, then a line approximately where the pipe will go through the "X" cuts in the weed mat, and then another 20-30cm below that where the food forms a lure to bring worms in. So the worms can either force their way up through the weed mat, or in through the lower holes in the pipe, and then up and out into the garden beds.

I'd never given much thought to what the worms' incentives to go upwards would be, but it turns out that they do that anyway, and the beds are (two years later) quite healthy and useable. They dislike noise and vibration, according to lore - but we live a few metres away from a highway that has trucks and machinery passing by all the time - and there are plenty of worms around. Nobody told our worms the story apparently...

True Story I Swear: I probably needn't have bothered to make any arrangements for the worms to get from the holes below to the holes above the mat. When I went to plant the first plants the ground already had worms in it. Might have been because we also shifted much of the original gardens' soil and reconditioned it then used it to fill these beds, but they were also straight up through the weed mat, they then also quickly found their way up the drain holes in the big pots, and were teeming in the pots - and we used new bagged potting mix in those so it had no worms prior to filling into the pots...

Anyway. We dug down into the ground under the Xs and pushed the PVC pipes down, then returned a few handfuls of the dirt back down the pipes to lock the bottom in place, and now after two years, they're immovably locked into the ground. I've emptied dozens of scoops of vegetable scraps into them, and to make it appealing to the worms, keep light out with end caps. 

Five 100mm PVC end caps with some plastic drawer handles make the lids to seal the feeders, and the reason I made my tubes stick up 30cm above the bed is that at that height I can reach over the wire mesh surrounds you can see in the first picture to fill the feeders, because we needed to let our cats enjoy the courtyard too, but stop them digging up our seedlings to poop there.

More recently I added reticulation circuits around the garden and the one with the lowest pressure and shortest ON time I added some thin tubing, through a hole in each cap and put a slow dripper there, which means that when the reticulation comes on, the food scraps get soaked and the moisture attracts even more worms. 

The underside of a feeder cap - you can see the
screws holding the handles and the red dripper.

Cat loo preventer. Hinged
for easy deployment.

Last three beds - the last one
was supposed to be the cat loo, is
now just another bed in rotation.

Here are three more clever/frugal things - the lattice panels were recovered from our old garden beds and resized to fit into a bed for climbing support. Then in the detail picture you can see how I hinged the front and sides of the wire mesh panels so that they can be folded and stashed flat when not needed.

And you may have picked up that there's actually a third raised bed right at the end outside the sleepers, and that's the one we put in especially as a cat loo - and of course, they don't use. So now we've actually used it as a composting bed, and grow potatoes under it and green compost plants up top, and turn that material under a bit and then use it to top up the organic content of the other five beds. The cats meanwhile get the use of each garden bed we fallow for a few months so they get to enrich everywhere... 

Last Minute Words Of Wisdom

We've had these beds since 2020 and they've been productive as anything. I drop clippings down the feeders, food scraps and composted food scraps, and sometimes even a handful of soil. The worms seem to carry most everything away, but if they ever needed clearing out a small scoop on a stick would do it, and the worm gunge brought up that way could be used on the garden beds to enrich the soil and improve water holding capacity. 

I could 3D print a suitable scoop and I might do that one day, if I do the .STL files and some new images will appear in this post.

One of the beds has become our perpetual aromatic herbs bed and as soon as they've all grown a bit taller we'll let the cat use that as a loo because the won't be able to dislodge a healthy rosemary or lavender, and the pineapple sage and curry plant are already big enough so we're just waiting - one more winter - for the others to catch up.

UPDATE in mid 2023: The pineapple sage grew HUGE, has had to be pruned back hard twice already. The cats have tried but failed to dig the aromatics out, and I keep adding mulch and soil to keep it going, also a good spray with seaweed extract every so often. The worms do a great job of feeding the plants.

(Also, 'barriers'  of short bamboo stakes can prevent the cats from digging where we don't want them to.) Anyone worried about cat poo should consider that any unfenced open garden bed would cop this anyway, and also WE HAVE WORMS and they eat poo. hehehehe. No problemo!

I've already run reticulation hoses from the taps, along the fence, and past each of the beds, there are three in all and I'm building and programming a retic controller for it to take away one of my last few chances to fail, that of letting plants dry out. By running all three circuits past each bed I can select which watering cycle out of the three is more appropriate for the plants in it, also of course the pots are all in reach of three different watering programs too, and as I'm planning a few sensors and some weather awareness in, I should be sure of keeping everything alive all year 'round.

While the lower garden beds aren't as kind to my knees and back as a proper keyhole garden setup would be, between the handy sizes of the beds and having a decent kneeler makes a lot of difference. 

Added 02/June/2022: Brief Discussion Of How It Works:

The classical Lesotho keyhole garden is built up with tin and plastic and sticks and cane and filled with trash and fillers until a foot or so (~~30cm) from waist height, then a floor is laid over that and then the actual garden soil. The garden plan from above is a circle with a wedge taken out of it. At the point of the wedge, a cylinder is partly buried, on end. Often a cheap plastic bucket with the bottom removed. 

It must be light-proof and have a lid that fits and keeps light out. Then the household food and garden trash scraps are tipped into the bucket, the lid is put on, and the garden is planted and watered well and kept watered. Any worms in the garden soil will find the food and start eating it, distributing it in the form of worm poo around the garden bed. It in fact replaces fertilisers with worm castings. 

In the plentiful sunshine of Africa, keeping the plants watered at all times is one of the keys. Worms only like damp to wet soils and will die if you stop watering, and plants need water all the time too, as otherwise they have periods of not growing, or worse, actually lack of moisture doing them damage that they'll never recoup. So the need to constantly keep water up works for both worms and plants.

In our case, the beds are ON the ground not ABOVE it, but the weed mat gives a degree of separation. The PVC pipe bridges the regions beneath the weed mat with the soil of the garden on the weed mat, and the region above ground that's used as the filler. The series of holes drilled into the sides from just below the garden soil to the region below the weed mat provides easy passages for the worms up from the ground, into the food, and into the garden bed soil.

To be honest, supposedly the worms can squeeze through holes in the weed mat but they need access to the worm food so there need to be side holes a-plenty. In our old kitchen garden when I was a kid we used to bury food scraps in the garden beds, same deal but worms hate disturbance so the feeder is a little better. That leads to the corollary, the length of PVC pipe above the ground that should all be filled with food scraps, watered very occasionally, and otherwise left alone.

Water the garden beds regularly to keep the plants and worms happy, and every few months or so, push the food down and refill the tube. It can last from a few weeks to a few months - in my case about 2 - 3 months, and would be better if I'd used 150mm PVC instead. But that starts taking away from the plantable area of the bed, so it's a balancing act. 

On the bonus side: The 'garden soil' you get from most garden centres is just mineral dirt with little organic content. For the first year I was mulching the soil with wood chips and shavings, dry grass, I planted a few crops of green manure and dug it back in, and in that process and with the worms' assistance, the soil has organic content and structure and isn't just rock hard clumps.

Don't overdo the fertilisers, I used maybe two handfuls of a pelletised all round fertiliser and a few watering cans of diluted Seasol across all five beds in the first year, and since then I haven't needed to add anything but water, scraps, and compost made in a bottomless bin quite close to the beds. (I had more scraps and didn't want to waste all of that goodness so as much of it as our worms will eat, I'd rather it went into my gardens than the local composting place where it doesn't do anything for my gardens.) 

Added 14/05/2023: The Millie Notes: 😸

(Response to a Facebook query.)

I don't actually put brown in. I figure that it isn't compost I'm making, and the worms are in the wild and so they can balance their own diets, what goes in is kitchen vegetable scraps, trimmings, scraps, and prunings from picking and managing the veges, and sometimes solarised grass runners. I don't move the feeders at all, I reckon the worms may have some kind of bush telegraph and moving the feeders would only confuse them. (No - JK, but apparently they're happier when their feed areas are undisturbed so I try not to disturb beds or open the feeders where possible.) 

The feeders are cheap enough to make, mine are about a metre of PVC each and if you don't mind bending down to fill them (and disturbing the worms more often due to having to fill them more often) you could get away with a 60cm length so you could get quite a few from a single length. I've used around 1m lengths because a) I can fill them to the top with scraps and the water dripper stops them crisping in the heat and sticking to the sides and so I can get up to 3litres of scraps in at a time, b) at my age I prefer not having to kneel or bend to fill them, and c) I sometimes have the cat screens up and they're 90cm tall so it's easier to reach over and manage the feeders. If you don't have tiny raised beds like I have and are using longer beds, I'd say put feeders in with the thought in mind that they each cover a 60cm - 80cm radius. 

I have five feeders, one in each of the original five beds (and I'll make another one for the "cat loo" when I find another metre of 90mm PVC laying around on a worksite or whatever) and the tube I had was 90mm diameter, I can fill them quite a long way so I can get between a litre and maybe up to three litres of scraps into each one at a time. (More if you use 100mm PVC, sort of in the 1.5 - 4 litre range.) I just used what I had to hand. Rather than disturb the all feeders every week, I start at one feeder and do that, collect scraps for a week or so and do the next one, etc. If they're still full when I go to start a new round, the scraps that week go to the Council organic bin because I don't have a lot of space now so I don't have compost any more. And anyway the worms dispose of a fair proportion of my scraps and trimmings/prunings. 

They're also coming up and cleaning up the cat doings, I just push those down 3 - 4cm deeper with whatever's to hand and they magically disappear. Being worms, they prefer green scraps to dry browns, also it takes longer for bark and mulch to break down. I suppose you could also half bury a 20 to 50 litre drum with holes drilled around the bottom half and just throw compost mix in there, the only problem I can see with that is that the heat would probably be quite unpleasant for worms and also that's a large lump of material to go anaerobic because once it's down you shouldn't disturb it again as it'll drive the worms away for a while. (Some disturbance doesn't seem to deter ours because we have the Bass Hwy right outside so there's disturbance 24/7. But I still like to keep their feeders as peaceful as possible.)

In the old days people would just leave some beds fallow, dig smallish deep holes all over and fill them with kitchen scraps then cover them over, and then plant on them a year later. What I'm doing is similar but without the hassle of stepping (or worse, kneeling) in your garden and absent-mindedly going squish into a 30cm deep hole full of three months ago's dinner leftovers... 

This is all not an exact science, you need to sort of balance the volume of scraps, how fast it can rot, adding the water drip to keep it cool enough for the worms to feed, and the need not to disturb the feeders too often. I think I hit a lucky sweet spot with the material I had, also the ground we're on, etc. We have really hard clay 50cm below the surface and when it rains that drives the worms upwards into the raised beds. Lastly I can foresee the need one day for a 3D printed 84cm diameter auger scoopy thing to lift out worm castings from the bottom of the tubes to make room for new scraps, and I hope we can get some drainage in the naxt year or two. 

But do experiment - give things a try. 

Conclusion:

It took myself and a friend a few days to cut the sleepers and screw them together, weed mat it, and cart in the reconditioned dirt from the old garden beds. The sleepers cost under $200AUD when we bought them but since then COVID and all the shortages associated with it have probably put the price closer to $400 - having a source of old sleepers might be wise. 

This is the beginning of the third year for the garden and the soil's still only just settling in nicely. Turning it right over really killed it. Once your beds are established only make holes where you're going to plant something or have taken something out, and let the worms look after the soil for you.

Mulch on top with light material that they can come up at night and eat and they'll carry it down and build soil for you. Add extra dirt only if you absolutely have to, organic material is preferable. 

We don't use pesticides other than a few snail pellets (and only in closed-off beds to prevent any risk to the cats) and white oil or organic sprays, and for fertiliser I use a granulated one - and that only very rarely because the worms are doing a great job recycling our food waste for us. 

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