Learning How To Fish

Jim Gupta-Carlson 2013

        Tonight I finished building our compost pile for next year - a pile of fall leaves and weeds from cleaning up the garden after harvest.  The first garbage can full of kitchen waste also got buried the new pile.  Last years compost sits near next years potato garden, about 100 feet away.  It is black and rich and full of worms.  It no longer smells like layers of yard waste, food waste, chicken poop, cow poop, and goat poop.  It smells like rich topsoil - full of life.
 
       Compost is a very spiritual thing for me.  It is a mixture of waste - weeds, food scraps, poop, and straw.  With care - turning regularly - the poop and the rotting food help break down the leaves and the weeds and in time was dead and rather foul smelling mixture becomes nutrient rich soil that grows healthy and vibrant vegetables.  It blows my mind that individual waste products together create so much life and nourishment.

Three summers ago our yard was dead.  Years of motorcycles and four wheelers racing around a track built by a tractor had so badly compacted the sandy soil so badly that weeds wouldn't even grow.  That first spring I was recovering from a two level cervical fusion.  C5-C7 were now a mass of bone and exotic metal - I felt much better but barely had the strength to lift a shovel.  But I did.  That first year I turned a good length of that old race track and mixed in compost - goat poop from our new friends Dave and Liza Porter and sheep poop from a neighbor of the general contractor who remodeled our house when we bought it.  Later in the summer I added more goat poop from the Porters to the beginning of my first Squashville compost pile.  My yearly compost pile has hilled the following year's potatoes and corn and over time our dead yard has slowly come back to life - with compost and a shovel.  This summer's compost is the first to have poop from our own farm.  Our chickens -  who already give so much - contributed their litter this spring.  It was so hot the compost steamed every morning!  Marilyn and Arnold Grant also gifted us cow poop from their farm.  Compost - helped along with a lot of poop from our friends - is rebuilding our soil and enabling us to grow more and more of our own food.  This fall after three years of soil turning and gardening and mixing in compost I have finally cleared away a large enough area to have four distinct gardens, one of them always resting.  The resting garden is where the chickens range and scratch, eating weeds and fertilizing the soil and also is home to the compost pile.  The following year that compost pile will hill potatoes and corn in that garden and the chickens and compost pile will move on the next garden.  This is going to be a long process of growing, composting, turning, growing, and resting - but nothing worth doing, and truly rich is quick and easy.

Until next year when we take our first step toward producing our own meat - I am not looking forward to saying goodbye to my chickens when their day comes - we have been blessed to be able to buy meat raised by farmers we know and respect.  The biggest blessing however, is the gift of their manure from the animals they so carefully raise.  Savory goat shanks or a juicy ribeye feed us for a meal but the gift of manure for compost to nourish our gardens will feed us now and for years to come.