
By Anita B. Stone
Compost—there never seems to be enough. And if you keep adding material to a single heap, the stuff is never really finished. The solution? A three-bin compost system.
A three-bin compost system allows you to have different piles of compost in various stages of doneness. You start the pile on one end, move it to the second bin when the first is full and the compost is ready to turn, then repeat, turning compost into the third bin where it finishes. Two people can build a three-bin compost system from this plan—which repurposes free wood pallets—in an afternoon.
Tools and Materials
- Rake
- Shovel
- 7 untreated or heat-treated pine pallets (each 4′ by 3'4″)
- Hammer
- 1 pound 16d nails
How To Construct a Three-Bin Compost System
1. Level a 4′ by 14′ space with a rake and shovel, and stand up two pallets (with the thicker stringer pieces parallel to the ground) to create a 90 degree, L-shaped angle.
2. Nail the pallets together where the top and bottom stringers meet the slats, as detailed above.
3. Attach a second side pallet the same way to create a three-sided, open-faced box. Again hammering in nails as detailed above, attach another back pallet and side pallet to complete the second open-faced box. Repeat until you have three attached, open-faced boxes.
How To Compost in a Three-Bin Compost System
1. To compost, toss a thick layer of carbonaceous material, such as brown leaves, straw, or wood chips, into the first bin.
2. Shovel nitrogen-rich material, including grass clippings, manure, and kitchen scraps (no meat or bones), on top of the browns and cover with another layer of carbonaceous material.When it has begun to decompose, turn the material into the next bin.
3. Use the now-empty first bin to start the cycle over, moving and turning compost until it finishes "cooking" in the third bin.
Interested in learning more about composting? Check out these articles:
Join the side pallets to the back pallets by driving in two nails at 45-degree angles from the rear of the bin at both top and bottom corners.Illustration by McKibillo
Reposted with permission from our media associate Modern Farmer.
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By Aaron W Hunter
A chance discovery of a beautifully preserved fossil in the desert landscape of Morocco has solved one of the great mysteries of biology and paleontology: how starfish evolved their arms.
The Pompeii of palaeontology. Aaron Hunter, Author provided
<h2></h2><p>Although starfish might appear very robust animals, they are typically made up of lots of hard parts attached by ligaments and soft tissue which, upon death, quickly degrade. This means we rely on places like the Fezouata formations to provide snapshots of their evolution.</p><p>The starfish fossil record is patchy, especially at the critical time when many of these animal groups first appeared. Sorting out how each of the various types of ancient starfish relate to each other is like putting a puzzle together when many of the parts are missing.</p><h2>The Oldest Starfish</h2><p><em><a href="https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/216101v1.full.pdf" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Cantabrigiaster</a></em> is the most primitive starfish-like animal to be discovered in the fossil record. It was discovered in 2003, but it has taken over 17 years to work out its true significance.</p><p>What makes <em>Cantabrigiaster</em> unique is that it lacks almost all the characteristics we find in brittle stars and starfish.</p><p>Starfish and brittle stars belong to the family Asterozoa. Their ancestors, the Somasteroids were especially fragile - before <em>Cantabrigiaster</em> we only had a handful of specimens. The celebrated Moroccan paleontologist Mohamed <a href="https://doi.org/10.1016/j.palaeo.2016.06.041" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Ben Moula</a> and his local team was instrumental in discovering <a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0031018216302334?via%3Dihub" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">these amazing fossils</a> near the town of Zagora, in Morocco.</p><h2>The Breakthrough</h2><p>Our breakthrough moment came when I compared the arms of <em>Cantabrigiaster</em> with those of modern sea lilles, filter feeders with long feathery arms that tend to be attached to the sea floor by a stem or stalk.</p><p>The striking similarity between these modern filter feeders and the ancient starfish led our team from the University of Cambridge and Harvard University to create a new analysis. We applied a biological model to the features of all the current early Asterozoa fossils in existence, along with a sample of their closest relatives.</p>Cantabrigiaster is the most primitive starfish-like animal to be discovered in the fossil record. Aaron Hunter, Author provided
<p>Our results demonstrate <em>Cantabrigiaster</em> is the most primitive of all the Asterozoa, and most likely evolved from ancient animals called crinoids that lived 250 million years before dinosaurs. The five arms of starfish are a relic left over from these ancestors. In the case of <em>Cantabrigiaster</em>, and its starfish descendants, it evolved by flipping upside-down so its arms are face down on the sediment to feed.</p><p>Although we sampled a relatively small numbers of those ancestors, one of the unexpected outcomes was it provided an idea of how they could be related to each other. Paleontologists studying echinoderms are often lost in detail as all the different groups are so radically different from each other, so it is hard to tell which evolved first.</p>President Joe Biden officially took office Wednesday, and immediately set to work reversing some of former President Donald Trump's environmental policies.
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