Notebook Paper — Design Sample 056

The Marginalia
Term Notebook

A working notebook for the Autumn term of Practical Botany & Soil Chemistry. Everything in here is handwritten first and typed never — pencil smudges, corrections, and second thoughts included, because that is what a real notebook looks like.

RECEIVED · 19 SEP · PERIOD 3

Property of the fourth-year cohort. If found, return to the potting shed — there is a box by the door marked LOST BOOKS.

What we are meant to learn

Twelve weeks, three field trips, one long project. The order below is Mr. Achebe's, copied off the board on the first morning before anyone had a pen that worked. Weeks 7 and 8 are swapped from the printed handout — he changed them because the orchard floods in November.

Soil texture by hand-ribbon wk 1
pH titration, three beds wk 2
Germination rates, controlled light wk 3–4
Nitrogen cycle — the big diagram wk 5
Orchard survey (moved!) wk 8
Long project draft + defence wk 11

0 of 6 ticked off.

FieldworkTitrationGraph paperWellies requiredNo spreadsheets

Handout · clipped in

Marking scheme

Fieldwork 40%, notebook 25%, the long project 35%. Notebooks are marked on legibility of thought, not neatness — his words.

day 9 — bean, north bed

Lab 04 · Acidity of three beds

Ran the titration twice because the first burette had a sticky tap and I lost about 2 mL down the side of the flask. Second run is the one that counts. Priya read the colour change and I called the numbers, then we swapped so neither of us was doing both jobs.

Method, as actually performed

Collected 200 g from each bed at spade depth, air-dried on the bench overnight.
Sieved to 2 mm; the north-bed sample fought back — clay, obviously.
10 g soil to 25 mL distilled water, shaken 5 min, left to settle 10 min.
Titrated the supernatant, three replicates each, meter calibrated at 4.00 and 7.00.

Observation worth keeping: the greenhouse loam smelled faintly of ammonia when wet, which nobody wrote down at the time and which probably explains the nitrogen reading being high.

The numbers, copied clean

Bed readings — second run, 14 October
Bed	Soil	pH	N (mg/kg)	Moisture	Note
North	Heavy clay	5.4	18	31%	waterlogged corner
South	Sandy loam	6.8	42	17%	best germination
Greenhouse	Compost loam	7.1	96	24%	ammonia smell
Orchard	Silt over chalk	7.9	11	22%	chalk = alkaline
Control	Bagged potting	6.3	55	28%	reference only

↑ The orchard number is the outlier and it is not an error — the chalk under that field pushes everything alkaline. Worth a paragraph in the long project.

Things stuffed in the back

Last page of Composition Book No. 14. Book No. 15 starts with the orchard survey — remember to number the sheets this time.