Blog Spot...

Late March 2012 - Turning over an old leaf

More work in the garden, taking advantage of the nice weather. This time I am moving compost; turning over the old heap and putting the material in an empty bin as part of the process. The fresh stuff at the top now ends up at the bottom and can begin to rot down nicely.

A fairly full compost bin

Turning over the compost - old compost on the left moves to empty bin on the right

Half-way down the old compost I came upon some nicely ready material. Just in time for the final digging of beds and preparing for the new growing season.

March 2012 - Signs of life

Busy work in the garden this month, removing weeds and preparing for the new growing season. Quite a few changes as various fruit has been moved about to new homes over the winter. The rhubarb is showing good signs of life already and most of the gooseberry and blackcurrant cuttings seem to have survived. The strawberries are prolific as usual and we now have 3 dedicated beds full!

Rhubarb shoots showing signs of new growth.

February 2012 - Butterflies and the RHS

We went to RHS Wisley recently. Whislt we were there we visited the glasshouse and discovered an exhibition of tropical butterflies. Fortunately, being just before half-term and a week-day, it was not busy. The butterflies were flying around quite busily and quite a few were feeding on plants or fruit (provided at feeding stations).

The Greenhouses at Wisley

Butterflies at the Wisley Glasshouse

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January 2012 - Book published

Mark's book "Statistics for Ecologists Using R and Excel" was finally published just before Christmas. See it at Pelagic Publishing. This is a book about the scientific process and how you apply it to data in ecology. You will learn how to plan for data collection, how to assemble data, how to analyse data and finally how to present the results. The book uses Microsoft Excel and the powerful Open Source R program to carry out data handling as well as producing graphs.

The book took a long time to get finished but I think it was worth it. I certainly learned a great deal about writing and publishing during the process. The follow-up book to this is already in the planning stage "Community Statistics for Ecologists" will pick up where the first book left off and carry on to examine community data.

I am also in the process of finishing off a book exclusively about R, the statistical programming language. This is an Open Source, free program that is powerful and flexible (details here). It is fast becoming the de facto standard tool for just about any analytical job in business, science and industry. The book will be published by Wiley and is called "Beginning R". It's already listed on Amazon here.