On the last weekend day of summer, a bright, sunny Sunday, I head outside to prepare my pile and backyard for the coming bounty of the fall harvest season.

I stop first in the vegetable garden, tucked between the back patio and corner nook of the house. Bound by two corners of the house and two sidings of 6 by 6 inch wood beams, along which I’ve strung a short wire fence, the vegetable garden is ringed by a two-foot wide border garden of flowers and bisected on the inside by a cross-shaped walk of beach brick. I’ve added so much compost to the vegetable garden that it is now bursting at the seams. The brick pathway and stepping stones within the garden, as well as the flagstone walkway along the outside, are now much lower than the raised bed of garden soil.

Building up the soil is one of the chief aims of the backyard composter, and this season it appears I’ve raised the vegetable garden so that it is now a platter served up for the deer, who, sadly, seem to have beaten me to the last tomatoes of the season. Whether they lean in over the short wire fence or hop it outright I don’t know, but the deer have neatly pruned the once-sprawling tomato plants, chomped the cilantro and nipped the remaining cukes. They seem to have no taste for collard greens, fennel or dill. The basil, now bolting, has grown too bitter for both them and me. Time to harvest the gains and add the season’s leftovers to my pile.

First, I pluck a ripening Big Boy tomato from inside its cylindrical wire cage. It’s neatly marked with a four-square pattern of bite marks, just the size of the narrow, overbite incisors on the deer skull I found on a walk in some nearby woods last year and brought home to show my son. The skull now rests in a flower box planted with pansies outside the kitchen-sink window, a Georgia O’Keefe still life I like to ponder when washing the dishes.

You’d think the deer wouldn’t find the garden through the cleome flowers; at right are the flagstone steps sinking into the turf.

I’ve scraped my pile to bare ground, save for a small pyramid of compost scraps off to the side. The log wall boundaries and improved fencing are now in place. Time to begin anew.

I pull the tomato vines and other past-due vegetable plants and herbs out of the ground and haul several armfuls over to my pile, adding to it after a stroll around the garden beds to dead-head the most-tattered of the perennial flowers. They’ve grown tall and straggly through the summer, and now hang heavy with their seed heads. The stoutest I leave standing; the golden finches love to pluck the echinacea seeds from their perches on waving stems, and the dove flock to the coreopsis and cleome, which cast their spring-loaded seed pods across the ground. They grow nearly as tall as the sunflower, and their woody stems will make good, fibrous airways for my pile as well.

Each season the press of leaves squeezes air out of the heap of organic gleanings that is my pile; I’m hoping this early harvest of tangly stalks and stems and dirt-encrusted roots will serve as an airy foundation, a box spring of coils to the soft mattress of leaves to come.

I stroll back over to the vegetable garden and grip the wrist-thick stalk of a sunflower plant that had sprouted among the beach bricks I use along the walkway. Last weekend, I harvested the foot-wide bloom, which was heavy with ripened seeds. Each year my son and the girls next door harvest the seeds for a favorite “snack-tivity” – we wash and then soak the seeds in salt brine and roast them in a pan. If they don’t end up looking and tasting exactly like the sunflower seeds you get in a plastic pouch at the store, at least the kids enjoy the idea of fun food coming from the Jack and the Beanstalk plant in the garden.

Tugging the six-foot-tall stem this way and that, I wrest the sunflower plant from the ground. The root ball is the size of a melon, and even after flicking away the stray pieces of brick and dirt, the plant weighs a good 10 or 15 pounds. It amazes me how much a plant can grow in a single season.

I trundle the stout sunflower over to my pile and set it in the middle of the rest of the prunings. It will be the tent pole that stakes the heart of my pile. As the stalk decays, it will also serve as the conduit for air and moisture, from top to bottom. Around the base of the sunflower stalk I nestled more leggy stems of the fennel that has grown wild in the back corner of the vegetable garden. The hollow stems and fleshy branches gone to seed give my pile the smell of licorice.

Grown thick and stout (and mostly hollow) through the summer, this sunflower stalk will make a good ‘tent pole’ for my pile. I later surround it with leggy stems of fennel, and fresh grass clippings from a neighbor.

The long, hot, dry end to summer has not been kind to the grass I sowed two weeks ago, though with stints of watering, the lawn overall has grown in nicely in all but the sunniest spots. Here and there a mushroom sprouts from the grass, which I take as a sign the compost I heaped upon it has spread its own fecundity down into the turf.

The grass will continue to grow on into November, and I’ll run the mower across the yard several times to mulch the autumn leaves and grass clippings to add to my pile. For the last mow of the season, I always try to leave a thick layer of chopped-up leaves and grass on the ground to break down over the long winter. By then, my pile will be overstuffed, as there’s always more than enough leaves and other brown material to go around.

Even with the moderate drought and hot dry days, the trees cling to their still-green leaves. As the nights grow cooler and daylight dwindles they will soon get the signal to put on their annual show of color, and then the annual gathering of leaves will begin.

In the meantime, I have more backyard chores to attend to, among them repairing the hole in my brick garden walk left by the sunflower plant torn from its clutch along the garden’s beach brick path. I’ve also been meaning to improve upon a set of flagstone steps I’d laid down several years ago along the outside perimeter of the vegetable garden, extending into the grass from the patio, four stepping stones in all.

Most evenings I stroll along this flower bed to strip the stems of cleome of their banana-shaped seed pods, to cast the seeds upon the flagstone patio for the mourning doves to flock to at sunrise. Each morning when I take the dog outside, we flush a flight of doves from the patio. Dove are very flabbable, and their wings beat noisily as they rise to take perch on the crown of the roof and nearby pine trees.

These tall, gangly flowers now lean far over the grass and the sunken flagstone steps. I decide to embark on a landscaping project to extend the patio along the flower bed and raising it to the same level. Next season, the seeds will fall upon this new stretch of patio for the dove to pluck at, and I’ll have fixed the sunken step problem. Even better, having deposited several loads of fresh compost on my neighbor’s newly renovated landscaping a couple weeks ago, I know he has a supply of flagstone that I can repurpose.

First I scrape away the sod along the flower bed, using some of it to fill a sunken spot of turf in the front yard. The rest I toss, turf-side down, onto my nascent pile. The sod, rich with worms and organic life, will make a fine base for the coming season’s heap of leaves.

To build up the base for the flagstone, I add several buckets of small stones I’d plucked from the yard this past spring, then spread a thin layer of remnant compost to the foundation. The compost is more ceremonial than anything, as it will compress into what I imagine as a conduit for earthworms traveling from the yard under the new flagstone walk to the garden. The stones I’m happy to find a collective purpose for other than to leave piled into a mound in the corner of the yard.

I enjoy how my pile and backyard functions as a closed-loop ecosystem — a stone is pulled from the ground, its vacated space filled with compost from my pile; the stone replaces spare turf to be recycled as compost, which will then fill new holes in the ground. I also enjoy enriching this backyard ecosystem from further afield (and office), especially when it means a trip to the seashore.

As fresh compost makes a poor base for a new flagstone walkway and would be a waste to put under the pavers in the beach-brick path within the garden, I head to the beach to fill a couple of large buckets with borrowed sand.

I pick the town’s smallest and rockiest public access, along a tidal creek. Besides its contributions of sand and seaweed for my pile and backyard, the local beach, called Burying Hill, also churns up a steady supply of polished beach brick.

Tumbled by the surf and sand into streamlined pieces of all shapes and sizes, the washed-up artifacts of fired clay make fine filler for the garden walkway. I like how the ocher hues contrast with the dirt. The bricks soak up water like a sponge yet drain like gravel. In the spring they absorb the warming sun; on frosty fall mornings the bricks are rimmed with a coating of ice from moisture sweated out overnight. They will last forever, more or less. Plus, they’re free for the taking – though I do have some guilt for excerising salvage rights over a more altruistic “leave things be.”

The look and feel and utility of beach brick makes it a prized find at the local beach.

My favorite find is a pale yellow-orange variety flecked with bits of shell and straw. Surely these pieces date from the pre-Industrial, colonial era, when brick was formed of hand-dug clay and any old beach sand, then padded with salt marsh grass.

Who knows how long or far each piece has been tumbled by each tide, how whole it was before being ground down to a pebble, or from what man-made thing it came from. Some of the brick I find is charred on one side — the chimney from an old settler’s cabin? Is it from some seaside patio of a swanky estate that got sucked into the sea? Or is it just detritus from a load of fill dumped at the water’s edge back when we valued our beaches differently?

Sand from the beach provides solid footing for the “dove-walk” extension of my patio along the flower beds that line the vegetable garden.

But I digress. And that’s the thing that beachcombing shares with gardening and composting — it invites stray thoughts as I fill a bucket of sand or seaweed or canvas bag slung over the shoulder with a load of brick.

I return home with two plastic buckets heavy with beach sand and a new supply of beach brick, which I add to fill up the hole in the garden walkway made by the sunflower that had taken root there this past spring.

I want to plant a fall crop of lettuce, arugula and kale in the beds now cleared of the tomato plants and strawberries. Heaped with a fresh supply of compost, they need turning. The spadefuls of dirt spill over into the beach brick. That might suit the sunflower seed that takes purchase there next spring, but not my tidy gardener’s eye.

The solution is to tease out the concrete pavers that gird the brick walkway and reset them several inches higher. I use trowel-fulls of beach sand to nudge up the pavers, and add a few shovelfuls of compost underneath the stepping stones to keep them level with plumped-up garden soil. The higher border will not only allow me to keep adding top-dressings of compost to the vegetable garden but also create space to add newfound bricks along the walkway. What started out some years ago as a garden walkway with a single layer of beach brick is now six inches deep with round, ocher bricks.

I tamp down the rest of the sand along the newly etched “dove walk” and spend a happy hour arranging the jig-saw puzzle of repurposed flagstone into place. That’s the neat thing about tending my pile and backyard garden. Though the changing seasons and small projects mark moments of change, progress is always along a path that’s moving forward, growing, evolving.

I need all three days of the Labor Day holiday to put my pile to work. It’s the biggest compost heap I’ve ever raised, and harvesting it to spread across my lawn and around my garden plantings will be a happy but sizable weekend chore.

My lawn – a motley mix of poa annua, perennial ryegrass, some bluegrass and fescues, lots of clover and all manner of plucky weeds – takes a beating each year. It’s heavily trafficked by me and my garden wanderings, by the dog chasing after and fielding tennis balls, by kid traffic and deer grazing. The sod must also compete with the superficial roots of the trees that surround and shade it.

Some modern garden writers knock the idea of a grass lawn, but in a most rewarding way, my backyard is used much like a ball field or golf course, and every couple of summers I follow the lead of the greenkeepers and turf-growing pros that tend those green wards by aerating my lawn with a rented plug aerator.

I start Saturday morning with a trip to Home Depot. Configured like a walk-behind lawnmower, the gas-powered machine features a cylinder of four sets of hollow steel tubes that rotate when the self-propelled drive is engaged. In front is large rubber wheel filled with water that, along with a set of detachable lead weights, help drive the hollow boring tubes into the ground. As they rotate, the tubes poke into the soil, with each revolution extruding a fresh plug of soil, each about the size of a finger.

Muscling the gas-powered beast back and forth across the yard is a workout, and I have my hands full steering it. But in the time it takes to run a mower across the lawn, the spiked cylinder punches thousands of four-inch-deep holes into the turf. Littering the ground are that many plugs of soil, each a cross section attesting to the health of turf and the earth that supports it. Most of the finger-sized cores are topped with a snippet of green grass above a crumbly layer of brown thatch; below is a tangle of roots still clutching a small cylinder of soil.

Within weeks the grass rebounds, spreading its roots deep into the newly made and freshly plugged holes. What’s more, the softer and thicker lawn is better equipped to soak up all the rain it can take, which in this vicinity is more than 50 inches a year. At times, especially after a fall Nor-easter, or with this year’s spring melt, the groundwater nearly rises to the surface of my property, with the lowest part of my yard covered by standing water that takes a day or two to drain away.

Soil plugs, and the holes they came from, pepper the lawn after aerating.

Most lawns get compacted by foot traffic, creating all sorts of problems in keeping grass healthy; aerating helps break up the soil for air and moisture to seep in. The thousands of holes will soon be filled with fresh-made compost, mixed with the aerated plugs when they break down, along with the grass clippings and leaf litter that have been accumulating over the past few mowings.

I’ve rented the machine for four hours, which gives me just enough time not only to aerate my third-acre of turf, but also the smaller lawns of two of my neighbors. They help keep my pile supplied with leaves, and grass clippings and other things throughout the year, so it is good to be able to return a favor.

My arms have hardly recovered by the time I get back from the return desk at Home Depot and get to work dispatching my pile. I scoop up heapings of compost wholesale with the hay pitchfork. Holding a loaded pitchfork over the wheelbarrow, I toss and shimmy each shovelful so that it filters through the wide curve tines into the barrow. I don’t bother to screen it other than to reach into the wheelbarrow every now and then to pick out a stray wood chip or sea shell that clangs against the metal or catches my eye.

The simple act of tossing the compost into the wheelbarrow breaks most of the clumps apart, though every so often I also stop to pluck away a not-quite-cooked fragment of compressed leaves. I toss it into the back corner, and after a few loads I’ve built a mini pile that I’ll keep in reserve to seed next season’s batch. Each clump of old leaves is a veritable Dagwood of bacteria, mold and microbes to activate the coming crush of fall leaves.

It takes a dozen or so scoops with the wide-tined pitchfork to fill the wheelbarrow, and an equal number of flings with the spade to disperse the compost in arcing swaths across the yard. It’s not heavy lifting, as each load probably weighs about 40 or 50 pounds. But it is repetitive, and I fall into an easy if tiring rhythm.

Digging into my pile, after 10 months of nurturing a simple yet complex mixture of organic indredients to fruition as humus, the best soil amendment there is.

I can cover about a 25 ft. by 25 ft. stretch of ground with each load, and after a couple hours, most of my yard is covered by a scruffy patchwork of compost. A neighbor walks by with his young son on a tricycle, looks across the rough, coffee-dark mess littering the yard and asks, “what happened to your lawn?” I explain that it’s just temporary, and take a few minutes to rake in some of the heaviest patches.

If screened and sifted finished humus is the smooth variety of peanut butter, then my pile is very much the chunky style. But I will further rake and then mow over all that I’ve spread across the yard, and the berm of compost I lay down along the perimeter of the long, narrow bed of perennials will soon mesh and melt into the deep mulch of rotting wood chips.

As I excavate my way into the midst of my pile, unearthing richly dark, cold-pressed humus — the really good stuff — I begin making trips with the filled-to-the-brim wheelbarrow to each of my three neighbors, who have contributed to the fulsomeness of this year’s heap. My neighbors Craig and Sylvia have recently renovated the front walkway to their home, creating garden areas lined by granite pavers. The garden beds so far are empty, with dirt floors some six inches below the top of the pavers. They are perfect vessels for load after load of compost to mix in time with the hard-packed base earth.

My neighbors the Giaumes have started an in-ground herb and vegetable patch beside their house this year for the first time. On a bare patch of ground nearby, I dump four loads of compost into a long pile, for the wife to mix into the new and now weedy beds.

My neighbors across the street, Jean Luc and Claire, have long tended their garden areas, and for them I spoon out barrows of humus as top-dressing.

My pile yields a prodigious amount of compost to spread wholesale across the lawn and garden beds.

By lunchtime, I’ve covered all the sections of my lawn that I plan to overseed, hauled 10 loads over to the neighbors and still have a third of my pile left. I’ve lost track of how many wheelbarrow loads I’ve spread, but it’s at least 40. After every few wheelbarrows, I stop to rake in the thickest spreadings; the tines of the rake further tease the clumps apart, and most of the compost disappears down through the blades of grass. A ton or so of wet, crumbly bits and pieces of humus — newly minted living soil — is but a small deposit when spread thinly across a patch of scrappy turf.

Spreading finished compost by the wheelbarrow across my lawn and garden beds.

I dig my way around and into this year’s batch of compost. It has distilled into a fairly uniform mix of crumbly dirt and bits of leaves. Shoveling through it is like flipping through a scrapbook of organic memories; I come across a tangled length of monofilament attached to a rusty hook; a petrified husk of an avocado shell. My pile coughs up a furball of matted dog and cat duff from the vacuum bag I’d added to the mix last winter. I fill more wheelbarrows and dump loads across the garden beds, flinging it straight from the wheelbarrow with a twist one way and then another.

Toward the end of the day, I’ve worked through the bulk of my pile. I figure I’ve spread about two cubic yards so far, or about as much to fill the bed of a big pickup to the gunwales. All that remains of my pile is a rough mixture of clumpy old matted leaves, a few seashells and a stray corn cob or two. Over the next couple weeks, as I do more fall transplanting and find more garden chores to do, I know I’ll sift through my mini pile further until its shrunken to a few shovelfuls.

On Sunday, I take a break from my pile. I need a day off, and use it to go for a hike with my son and neighborhood kids. It’s yet another sunny day, and I want to let the compost dry in the sun. I want the  tiny critters lurking within it to have time to find refuge by burrowing down into the turf before I mow the yard to finish up my weekend’s work.

I haul the mower out of the shed after a late breakfast on Monday and give the lawn a quick mow to further shred the last scraps of the compost top dressing. The hot dry spell has yet to break, and I decide to wait until mid-week, when thunderstorms are forecast, to spread a 10 pound bag of new grass seed across my yard, an annual replenishment of perennial rye, fescues and blue grass. The fruit of turf-grass farms in the Pacific Northwest, if some of it sprouts and takes root, my yard will have that much more genetic variation. Abetted by some slick aspirational marketing and the best biology Big Ag can buy, grass is a world-class colonizer. It also may be in man’s nature to cast seed upon the ground.

But there is a time for everything, and on a hot Labor Day afternoon I head to the beach my son and the neighbors. I can’t help but notice the ragged lines of seaweed washed up at the high-tide mark, and look forward to returning in a few weeks’ time, after the beach-goers have gone, to harvest the first batch of rotting green seaweed to add to the dead dusty leaves that begin my next pile.

We end Labor Day Monday with a backyard barbecue. My neighbor Don comes over. He looks across the back lawn to the empty space where my pile has resided for the past 10 months and asks, “where did the compost go?”

Something’s missing from my backyard — a ton or so of fresh compost … but not really.