Category Archives: naturenotes

0 °C is not warm, even though I keep thinking it is. It just means that the ice melts.

Arsenic nuclei have an odd number of protons in them. They also have a lot more protons in them than iron nuclei, which are the heaviest nuclei made in any sort of number by stars. There is no way that … Continue reading →

I read somewhere that foraging for wild mushrooms was damaging forests. Every so often it occurs to me that the most dangerous thing you could do with a GPS would be to log the positions of all of your nearby … Continue reading →

The tomatoes I fetched from the garden yesterday between them show all of the shades from tomato colour to tomato colour.

I saw a dabchick on the river the other day. There is no clearer sign that autumn is here.

Children raised by wolves typically have extremely poor language skillscitation needed which is attributed to lack of human contact.citation needed But what if it were really caused by lack of crusts and green vegetables?

The local authority send round sacks for biodegradable waste. Among other things, you’re not allowed to put logs in them, though twigs are fine. You might as well forbid heaps.

Secateurs can be a tool for understanding your garden as well as controlling it.

Everybody likes to watch stuff decompose, but getting a compost heap is one of the very few socially acceptable ways of doing it on the premises.

How to tell? If the usual care and maintenance of the specimen involves hacking bits off, and those bits are of the same material as the trunk, then it is probably a plant.