Friday, August 17, 2007

this is what I did



As it turns out, time is ticking. Having planted several beds in the new garden, we lost a few days to just keeping up with needs for work and sleep, and finishing the last of the Harry Potter books, and the garden hasn’t managed to make much progress. Except for the tomatoes, the herbs, and the bean plants, which held a congress, a hearing, an impeachment proceeding, and decided to move on without us.

So one morning last week I had my boots on before I had finished my cup of coffee, and got myself down to the compost pile. There isn’t much material left there, but perhaps just enough to fill the last few beds so that a couple of late-harvest crops can be squeezed out of them. I got right to it while Deirdre started to tackle the problem of the perennial garden.

All compostable material from the restaurant comes home each night and is added to one of the two large composting bins we maintain at the foot of the lawn (downhill and downwind of the house). As we are filling one bin, the other is maturing, or composting, or disappearing to local furry bandits and the crows. It often seems to compost faster than I can fill it. But once I can’t put any more material in, I close up that container and start filling the other one. (We lost one lid to a bear a few years ago, so the remaining lid goes back and forth between containers according to need.) When the second is full, I turn out the contents of the first container, and start refilling that. The composted material then gets mixed into other, clean soil with the rototiller, and then, as luck would currently have it, a mix of composted horse manure and sawdust from a local horse farm. (The first batch of “weeds” in the garden will be oats.) Last week I loaded this concoction three times into the garden cart for a trip up the lawn to the next bed to be filled, the one in the NE corner of the garden. And I even got some more arugula in.

Cross your fingers.

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