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.

I turn another page on the calendar tacked up on the back of my kitchen door and step onto the back porch with morning cup of coffee in hand to let the dog out. As is his custom, he sprints straight across the yard, past my pile, to patrol the back corner of the yard. Often, squirrels use the stockade fence that runs along the back property line behind my pile as a perch and a highway, and Miller is eternally vigilant in keeping them off his territory.

I take a seat on a porch chair to eye a cicada that’s fastened to the top of the front right leg. The thrum of cidadas lately is loud enough to drown out the sound of traffic on the highway that passes a quarter-mile or so from my house. The sight of the bulbous insect, with its iridescent wings and truly bug eyes, reminds me of boyhood summers in the Midwest, when we’d capture the flying beasts and tie kite strings around their legs to fly them in tight circles above our heads.

I leave the cicada to its perch, and plot out a busy week ahead. The Labor Day holiday comes late this year, at the end of the first week of September. I’ve set aside the three-day weekend for dispatching my pile, and I have work to do beforehand.

In this day and age, tending to a yard is a very much a lifestyle choice. Most people in this affluent, bedroom-commuter community outsource their gardening duties, to lawn-service companies with big, equipment-laden trucks or handymen driving old pickups. Others limit their chores to planting annuals or keeping pool and patio landscapes tidy. Actual manual labor is rare, and a benign disconnect from backyard nature, reinforced by central AC, is the rule. The fear of contracting Lyme disease, a bad case of poison ivy, or some malady like West Nile virus or Zika, is real; so are the many other options for recreation and release, from the virtual reality of video games, smart phones and TV to paddleboards, golf and Zumba class at the gym.

The backyard is my habitat of choice; it’s where I like to spend my free time. I see the stewardship of my property as not a chore but an escape, an indulgence. The work I put into it saves me a lot of money over the course of a year, and also yields all kinds of other rewards.

But still, there is work to be done, and this week is the time to do it. Sitting next to the lolly-gagging cicada, I plot out a daily schedule of projects to take care of before the Labor Day holiday.

The weather forecast calls for another week of hot dry weather. I read online that our region has set a record of 60 straight days of 80 degrees or hotter daily temperatures, with a prediction of an unprecedented string of 90-degree days to start the month of September. I’m comforted by the fact that my boss is out of town for the week, giving me the chance to take off work early each day. What’s more, my son is away on a vacation with his mother, leaving me plenty of free time to putter about.

On Monday afternoon while the sprinkler waters both the lawn and the section of garden bed where I transplanted the ferns and hydrangeas, I pull pachysandra from along the perimeter of my house. If left unchecked, the ground cover will snake its way up under the wood shingles. It rips up easily, and I drag three small tarps worth over to the refuse pile I keep in the corner of the yard by the road.

It’s messy work and I’m drenched with sweat by the time I work my way around the three sides of my house where the pachysandra grows. To cover the newly exposed roots of the pachysandra, I sling shovel fulls of compost from my pile up against the house. A flashing of compost against the newly exposed foundation looks tidy, and the new lining of fluffy humus will make it that much easier to pluck out the racings of next year’s growth.

With the work tools and such out and some daylight to spare, I tackle another garden project I’ve been contemplating. Some years ago I bought a Montauk daisy and planted it in a small garden bed along the street, tucked between the driveway and a maple tree, behind which the border of forsythia grows.

Each spring the plant grows thick, only to be pruned by the roving bands of deer that use the shady street and my yard as a nightly pub-garden prowl. It’s also stressed by competing with the roots of the nearby maple. I have yet to see the plant blossom with its signature daisy white flowers.

Just beyond my backdoor is a garden patch that has been overtaken by lilies of the valley. They are lovely and fragrant in the spring, but by mid-summer have gone wilted and tawdry. Hard by the flagstone patio, the plantings are in direct sun for much of the day. I dig out the lilies, which already cover other, more shady spots of my mulched garden beds around the yard, and in its place put the Montauk daisy. Perhaps its proximity to my backdoor will keep the deer away and allow it to blossom. It may be wishful thinking, but worth my while to try on a late-summer evening.

Like the pachysandra, the lilies of the valley have tightly bound, interconnected root systems, and if dug into deeply enough come out of the ground whole cloth. I shake as much soil as I can from each section, but digging them out leaves a hole in the ground, which of course I fill with loads of fresh compost  mixed into the tired old soil. The daisy’s root system was a stunted spiral, as if still constricted by its pot; it should thrive in its new privileged place just outside the back door.

The yard in late summer. The grass needs watering, the pachysandra pruning, and perennials transplanted to more favorable places.

Wednesday, the first thing I do after getting home from the office is wash down two Advil with a cold beer. My chore today requires a certain amount of heavy lifting: Last weekend, while watching my son and the neighborhood kids bounce on the trampoline, I notice that their feet nearly strike the ground underneath it.

My son and his friends have grown up on the trampoline. Years ago I set a basketball post next to it, and my boy’s backyard sport is jumping high and slam-dunking. On hot days, I set the rainbow sprinkler underneath it; the sprays poke through the netting and make great cooling fun for all.

I decide to dig out a foot-deep depression from below the center of the trampoline, to create more clearance. Even at its best – and ringed by a tall safety net, a trampoline presents certain dangers to springy children; the last thing I want to see is one of them hitting bottom and hurting themselves.

After getting help from one of the girls next door to drag the trampoline into the yard, I set about digging through the soft dirt underneath it. The sheltered soil is rich and easy to shovel. Within an hour’s time I’ve filled five wheelbarrows with dark, rich topsoil. I spread three loads around the garden bed where I’ve done my recent transplanting. Another two I dump next to my pile. I’ll spoon shovelfuls of the dirt onto my pile as I build it with loads of fall leaves.

Digging out from under the trampoline makes it safer, and gives me a load of quality topsoil.

Adding topsoil to my coming pile is sort of like bringing coals to Newcastle, but the weight of the dirt will help compact the airy leaves, and the billions of microbial critters within each shovelful will help kickstart the composting process.

Before long, I’ve scooped out a depression about 10 feet in diameter. It looks just like an old buffalo wallow I once came across on my grandfather’s farm; he’d kept the area untilled as a remnant of the prairie his farm once was. Sure enough, after dragging the trampoline back over the shallow pit, the dog took up residence in his cool new cubby hole. I’m too sore and tired to get in the car to drive to the beach, so opt for a long shower instead.

On Thursday I tackle another needed, if picayune task: While dumping the fresh dirt in heaps into my garden beds, I noticed how much of it was covered with a season’s worth of seedlings – the sproutings of young maples, sycamores and grape vines, from seeds blown or fallen from the overhanging trees and vines from my and the neighboring yards. They’ve found ready purchase in the largest of my perennial beds, which last fall I’d loaded with the lion’s share of my pile.

The year before I’d devoted my pile to the lawn; last year instead of aerating, I decided to give the compost to the flower beds, forsaking my annual resupply of wood chips. The garden is thick with flowers, but the compost proved fertile ground for unwanted plants as well. This fall I’ll cover it again with wood chips and give my pile over to replenishing the turfgrass. But before I do I need to handpick the stubbornly resilient seedlings, or else they’ll just poke their way through the mulch and begin the process of turning my cultivated gardens into overgrown wild spaces. Lesson learned: compost is not so good as a cover to prevent weeds. In fact, it has been a nursery bed for opportunistic, and mostly invasive, plant growth. I should have figured…

I work my way through the thick growth of the perennial blooms that now fill my garden beds, stooping to pluck out the spindly sprouts of weedlings, tossing them out onto the lawn to wither on the sun-packed grass lawn. It’s a hot, humid night, and I take frequent breaks to go inside to change out a sweat-soaked baseball cap and to wash my hands. I know from past experience that some of the sproutings I pick are young shoots of poison ivy.

As I labor, my neighbor comes by for her nightly harvest of fresh pickings from the vegetable garden. She also informs me that her pail of kitchen scraps is full. Happy to break from the drudgery of weeding, I follow her back to her home to retrieve both her small bin of kitchen recyclables but also a spare metal garbage can from her pack-rat husband’s stores of spare refuse bins.

I have a supply of shredded office paper in the shed, plus my own nearly full Hooch bucket of coffee grounds and vegetable peels. As with the first garbage bucket, I first add a foot-thick layer of shredded sycamore bark and white office paper, plus a smattering of compost from my pile. The neighbor’s bucket of kitchen recyclables goes in next, topped by more shredded paper. I add my own kitchen supplies, and finish with more paper and compost, filling the old-school metal can about two-thirds high.

I’ve added fresh soil to bulk up a garden bed; next is a close-crop mowing before aerating the yard.

I set the can next to the first one. They’re like IEDs, packed with a combustible mix of natural-born energy.

Friday, I haul out the lawnmower and set the blade down a notch. Even though it’s now set just on the middle setting, the mower scalps the parched grass, sending out plumes of brittle dust from under the carriage. The grass hardly needed mowing, but I want to crop it as low as possible before layering the lawn with compost. I’ll rake the top dressing in, mow again, and then reseed.

I finish my week’s worth of yard work to the hum of cicadas and the buzz of the few pesky mosquitoes that have survived the end-of-summer dry spell. I have been the ant industriously laboring to prepare for the coming change of season. As the First Book of Proverbs admonishes,  “Go to the ant, you sluggard! Consider her ways and be wise, which having no captain, overseer or ruler, provides her supplies in the summer, and gathers her food in the harvest.”

Or as the grasshopper in the Walt Disney cartoon sings,

Oh I owe the world a living….
You ants were right the time you said
You’ve got to work for all you get.