The last day of August, a Sunday, and yet another fine summer day to spend doting on my pile and other backyard gardening duties. This summer has been as delightful here along the coast of southwestern Connecticut as the winter was bad. The weather has been hot and dry, with just enough dousings from summer thunderstorms to stave off outright drought.

After setting the rainbow sprinkler to arc across the sunniest part of my flower bed, I head over to my pile.

It sits in patient, ancient repose, Sphinx like, its flanks covered by weathered, crumbly detritus. I’d gleaned from one side five wheelbarrows of raw compost for my vegetable garden, and from the other four for the recent transplanting among the flower beds. The rest of my pile will soon be broadcast across my lawn, following the aeration I plan to do over the upcoming Labor Day Weekend.

It’s been several weeks since I stopped inserting fresh materials into my pile. I’ve filled one garbage can with sandwiched layers of kitchen scraps, shredded paper and additions of raw compost, and have mowed the lawn twice with strips of duct tape that seal off the bag catcher to mulch the clippings back into the turf.

Today my goal is to get to the bottom of my pile, at long last. I want to see if it’s fully cooked and ready to be served. I’ve tried before, but my pile always collapses on and into itself before I can reach its epicenter, the part of it I first laid down last November.

Finding the very beginning of my pile is like tracing the precise source of a river. I may never be able to pinpoint the wellspring, for after 10 months of poking and prodding, my pile has morphed and moved in place. Through the winter and spring I excavated holes across its top, reaching deep with the pitchfork. Did I touch the core? Perhaps.

After working the right side of my pile last week, I know there are few places within it that I haven’t fully turned over and outward. I decide to dig into the left side, using the pitchfork to tease out tightly compacted dark earth from the bottom; it looks like the bricks of peat I’ve seen being cleaved from Scottish bogs.

The inner core of my pile yields a clutch of raw leaves, undisturbed since last fall.

The chunks of compost crumble easily, with a texture of spent coffee grounds. A few sea shells drop through the matrix. I pierce a shred of tightly bound Sunday insert newsprint, from the bottom of my neighbor’s Angora rabbit’s hutch, tossed into a hole in my pile sometime late last winter.

I dig into and under my pile, excavating a wide cavity below an overhanging ledge of compost that trembles with each thrust of the pitchfork. I uncover a clutch of maple leaves, glistening wet but otherwise pristine. I lift them up out of the burrow and set them aside just before my pile collapses back onto itself.

For the better part of a year, I’ve been a good steward of my pile. I’ve tossed and turned every part of it, or near enough. I’ve mulled it over, lavished it with copious amounts of offerings. Soon I will not only get to the very bottom of it but cast my pile wholesale across my yard and garden beds.

Sometimes, the end result turns out not to be as important or interesting as the process of getting there. I can’t quantify exactly how much my pile will add back into the biomass that is the suburban property I keep, but I know all that it has given me to date — a year’s worth of mental musing and physical effort — and a ton or so of the best soil amendment on earth.

I will miss my pile, this particular edition of it. But it’s time to let it go, to return it from whence it came. Besides, seeing the brown leaves that are now falling across my lawn of late summer, I know my pile will soon rise, phoenix like, again.

A bright and breezy Sunday morning in late August brings with it the first hint of fall in the air. There’s a crispness to the air, and looking out across the backyard toward my pile, I see a single maple leaf, tinged with gold, flutter to the ground.

That’s all I need to get started with one of the most pleasurable annual rituals of backyard gardening – transplanting perennials.

This year, I’ve had my eye on a patch of ferns that has overtaken a sunny part of the perennial bed. They’ve thrived since I moved a few sprigs from elsewhere in the garden several years ago, mostly to insert some spring greenery to the garden bed that doesn’t appeal to the deer. I’ve since trimmed back some overhanging privet bushes and crabapple tree along the fence that had provided shade – and copious amounts of fruit that the birds love. The ferns are now sunburned and a tangly mess, and I am eyeing several other, more shady spots in the garden for them to go.

Just down the way from the fern patch are two hydrangeas that I planted a decade ago, when I was first landscaping the yard. Over the years the plants have grown large and fused into one. Above them, a $10 pin oak I salvaged from the fall clearance sale at Home Depot has now grown thick and tall.

I decide to transplant one of the Hydrangeas to the sunny spot. It’s the outdoor equivalent of moving the furniture around. It costs nothing, and gives the yard a new look.

Plus, for a backyard composter, nothing compares to digging a hole in a garden bed, filling it a tender plant plucked from the earth or pot and then tucking it in with heapings of fresh compost.

For a new planting, compost is both an insurance policy and a deposit guaranteed to pay dividends. As long as I add water, virtually every transplant thrives. Compost is such a surefire potting-soil mix, I even have the confidence to begin the fall transplant season in August. There’s still the risk of a stretch of late-season heat, but with some extra watering, the plants will have plenty of time to properly root themselves before the frost and freeze of winter sets in.

I first fill the wheelbarrow with compost, scraped from the side of my pile. As with the supplement to the vegetable garden last week, I don’t bother to sift or screen. I fill half the wheelbarrow with the pitchfork, then shovel up the moist, loose compost that shags out between the tines.

Freeing a well-established plant from the ground calls for a tender hand. The ferns roots spread out shallow along the ground. Using the straight-tined pitchfork, I circle around the edge of the root mat, loosening its grip so that I can pull the roots up like a thick carpet. I toss it en masse onto the wheelbarrow, shaking some soil from the roots and untangling the piece into five separate, smaller clumps of shaggy fern.

Ferns culled from a now-sunnier spot in my perennial beds will do well in this rock-lined shade garden.

Three plantings will go along a small rock wall that contains a small shade garden. Two Japanese maple trees, transplanted eight or nine years ago from coffee cans given to me by my neighbor Jean Luc, bookend the small bed. They are now 15 feet tall and now form a purplish screen between the street and yard. Between then is a rhododendron that blooms small fuschia flowers early each spring. A profusion of bleeding hearts fill the rest of the bed; their branches of dangly pink and white are another springtime show. The ferns will fit right in.

I plop the three ferns into their newly made holes, and surround their roots and stalks with shovelfuls of compost, emptying the rest of the wheelbarrow around the slender trunks of the Japanese maples, the rhody and the largest root balls of the bleeding hearts, which I’ve recently dead-headed.

The hydrangea, as big around as a Barcalounger, requires a gentler approach to extracting from the ground. After loosening the soil around it with the straight-tined pitchfork, I reach under the root ball to trace the largest roots by hand, following the tentacled threads with my fingers to pull them out in as long and full as I can. Usually one side of a plant’s root ball releases first. I pull the main stem to the side and straddle it between my legs to pull the plant out of the ground.

It’s too heavy for me to lift into the wheelbarrow, so I drag the hydrangea on the small plastic tarp to its new home. I widen and deepen the hole left by the smattering of ferns, and drop the hydrangea into it, twisting the stubby base of stems so it sits upright, with its fading bloom balls facing outward toward the yard.

I pour compost around the hydrangea and press the crumbly moist mix into the disturbed soil around it with my foot, creating a circular trench that I fill with water that soaks deep into the ground.

This big hydrangea will do well in this spot; later this summer I’ll fill in the empty spaces with more transplanted perennials.

The hydrangea blends right in with the rest of the perennials. I add a second wheelbarrow full of compost here and there nearby. I can afford to be generous with compost this year, and there’s no better use for it than as a security blanket for these perennials, uprooted or not.

It’s now the third week of August, a dry spell that has seen only one good rain over the past three weeks. I’ve spot-watered the vegetable garden and a few of the perennials in the beds that line the grass lawn that surrounds the house. I have yet to water the grass this summer, aside from the drops that fall from the rainbow sprinkler when it arcs beyond the vegetables growing in the fenced-in patch bordered by the house and back patio.

But still, the turf keeps growing and remains thick and green; surely it has benefited from the compost I have spread across it over the years and the aeration that allows the roots to extend deep down into the soil profile to chase after water and nutrients even through the dog days of summer. I’ll mow in the coming week and grass-cycle the clippings back into the turf. My pile needs no more hot greens this season.

More than a week’s gone by since I last turned my pile, and today after work I decide to dig back in to finish a long-awaited task I began yesterday evening. It’s harvest time for my pile, with the first takings to be spread across the vegetable garden. Rain is forecast for the weekend; all the better to time my yardwork.

Last night I weeded the small patch of vegetables in the raised bed I’ve fenced in the back corner of my house. Truth be told, I spend more time each year tending my pile, but I do grow a handful of tomato plants, some arugula, basil, cilantro, kale and lettuce – more than enough to keep me and my neighbors in salad the summer long.

Cucumbers and beans grow along the low wire fence. Tall, spiky cleome and some other flowers bloom the summer long in narrow beds that border the fence, self-seeding each year and throwing off enough seeds to keep a covey of dove happy the summer long. The flowers that grow thick along the fence of the garden do a fair job in keeping the deer at bay, though this summer they’ve nibbled the vines of cukes and beans that have spread beyond the fence.

This summer my next-door neighbor brought over some collard greens, fennel and dill that she’d started in pots. Lacking a garden, she asked if I’d grow them. Now all are in fine fettle, and most evenings she or a daughter comes by to cull the day’s take of cherry tomatoes or pluck a handful of greens for the night’s salad.

It’s now time to cull the riot of spent flowers and vegetables — the greens I planted in the spring have mostly all bolted — and prepare for the fall planting of more lettuce, kale and arugula.

I enjoy the cleome most of all, for their profuse flowers and for the small, banana-shape pods that produce an amazing number of small seeds that look just like poppy seeds, to which the dove that flock to my backyard seem addicted to. I cull a handful of seed pods from the cleome stalks most every day and spread them onto the flagstones of my back patio. I can hardly go outside my back door without a dove or two or three taking flight. They perch on the top of the roof, biding their time while I set up shop at my pile, then flutter back to the ground to continue their feast.

In addition to finding a stray stem of crabgrass or two lurking among the greens – and about to go to seed – I had some major “weeding” to do in my garden last night — at least when you define a weed as any plant in an unwanted place.

The fennel has grown tall and lanky and bends over the fence; two of the tomato plants have withered with rot, and the potato, cucumber and watermelon vines have sprawled across the beach-brick path.

The biggest and best surprise of the day comes when I tug at the potato vines. Early in the spring my neighbor had brought by a bag of rotting potatoes from her fridge. I cut up a couple with the most prominent eyes, planted them in the garden and then mostly forgot about them. Potatoes are very much an under the radar garden planting. But today I pluck the two sprawling plants from the ground and find their roots are a mass of potatoes, looking just like the ones I find in the bin at the grocery store.

Most weedy are the strawberry plants that virtually taken over half of the garden. Though they produce a couple weeks’ worth of very tasty berries each May, they have overwhelmed my small garden patch. I spent an hour or so ripping out the most of the vines, leaving only a small patch in the back shady corner of the garden that I promise myself I will restrict the strawberries to next year.

Hating to waste so many viable fruit plants, I tease out a dozen or so of the biggest clumps of strawberry roots and save them for my across-the-street neighbor, whose daughter is the garden’s main strawberry picker. He’s promised her that next year they’ll have their own strawberry garden.

The rest of the garden trimmings I pile together and, using the long, weedy fennel plants as a sled, drag the lot over to the side of my pile. These fleshy vines and hollow stalks will make a fine, fluffy base for next season’s compost heap.

Out with the old, in with the new. After dragging the overgrowth of spent fennel and tomato vines from the vegetable garden, I begin the harvest of my pile, adding wheelbarrows of fresh compost back into the garden.

Having ripped out much of my own strawberry field, I now have a bare patch of garden. I will soon plant for the fall season, but first what my garden needs is a bumper crop of compost from my pile.

So tonight after work I head out to the backyard to begin the harvest of my pile.

I start at the front, which I’d worked the week before. The compost holds together just enough for me to use the pitchfork to fill the wheelbarrow. I don’t bother to screen it, though I stop occasionally to pluck out a wood chip or piece of broken branch or toss a pancake-sized clump of leaves back onto the top of my pile. Having just been turned and now mostly matured, at least this part of my pile is cool to the touch. I’m delighted to see all the worms that have squirmed their way back into the mix, and happy to transport them along with the compost to my garden.

The barrow fills quickly, and I wheel it across the yard to the garden to toss shovels in and around the plants, on both sides of the fence. Within a few minutes, I’ve spread five wheelbarrows full of compost across my garden, which measures just about 20 feet by 20 feet. It’s a chore I do every August, to give the plants protection from the withering heat of late summer, and a layer of absorbent organic material to soak up and retain what water I give them.

An “after” photo of my vegetable garden, which accepts all the compost I can give it.

Later in the fall, when the last of the tomatoes stay green on the vine, I’ll cull the rest of the plants and spade in the compost. I started the garden a decade ago from bare dirt; over the years I’ve added enough compost so that now its surface is raised to the level of the 6 x 6 wood beams that gird the base of the wire fencing.

After extracting five wheelbarrows of compost for my vegetable garden, I’ve hardly made a dent in my pile.

It’s the home stretch for my pile in its annual cycle of transformation from an assemblage of dead leaves and such to a new life as the mysterious thing known as humus.

I’ve nurtured my pile as best I can, adding at regular intervals copious amounts of fresh green organics — of all manner and in varying states of decrepitude — as well as regular replenishments of decaying old browns, natural and manmade, and other essentials, like water and pee and sand and soil. The process has kept my property tidy, given me a scavenger’s joy in sourcing such an array of recycled contributions, and provided a steady outlet for physical exertion and mental musing.

It all adds up to a very large heap of moist, dark crumbly organic matter sitting in the corner of my backyard.

For the past weeks, I’ve largely left my pile alone, trusting its inner workings to complete the job of turning all these elements into a finished product – part fertilizer, part soil amendment, part good, ol’ fashioned dirt – that I will soon spread across my lawn and garden, and share with neighbors.

Today after work, it’s time to dig back into my pile and give it a good turning. Over the past couple of months, I’ve infused the ever-absorbent and accommodating heap with an ample supply of grass clippings, pulled weeds and other trimmings, as well as the leftovers from my kitchen and coffee pot as well as food waste from my neighbors. I’ve poked and prodded and carved up my pile as best I can to add air and help mix and disperse the yin of matted brown leaves with the yang of the ripe-to-rotting organic material that will meld with it.

Despite my efforts to blend my pile all together, there are still parts that remain untouched since last fall – the deepest, darkest parts of the base. I want to get to the bottom of my pile.

I’ve tilted back one side of the log wall that contains my pile to excavate its inner reaches. Note the dried leaves in the crevasses.

I know from year’s past, as well as my recent excavations, that there remains a layer of compressed leaves at the core of my pile. Like an Egyptian archaeologist opening a pharaoh’s tomb, I also know that once exposed to light and air, these long buried leaves will quickly crumble. That’s the goal at least.

I have another chore, and that is to find a repository to stockpile the continuing pile of kitchen trimmings and other compostables as my pile matures. For the first time this year, I’ve decided to cut off my pile from having to ingest fresh fodder and instead create a starter batch of compost.

My packrat of a neighbor has several extra garbage cans he doesn’t use, so I borrow one with a lid and set it up on the opposite side of the log wall that I’ve splayed to get to the side my pile. It’s a good spot to park the can as I harvest this year’s batch of compost and prepare for the next season’s haul.

I fill the bottom with a layer of pieces of sycamore bark, then cover those scraggly bits with half of my regular supply of shredded office paper for a base of absorbent material. I top it with a pitchfork of compost from my pile, then upturn my kitchen Hooch bucket. I cover that small batch of leftovers and coffee grounds with another forkful of compost, filling up nearly half the plastic garbage can.

As my pile matures, new raw materials go into a garbage can — a base of sycamore bark, shredded paper, food scraps and a dollop of compost…

My neighbors’ kitchen scraps fill a five-gallon white plastic bucket, and in it goes as well, a mucky supply heavy with corn husks, avocado skins and egg shells. As these are all slow to decompose, I’m glad I’ve made the decision to keep them out of my nearly finished pile, but worry that I may have just created a barrelful of stinky problems for the next month or so. But after mixing up the mess with a pitchfork and adding a bit more compost and the rest of the shredded paper, I put the lid on this small batch of compost, flipping up the handles to seal it up for a week or so. It’s air-tight at least enough to not attract flies, and surely the few stray worms I’ve tossed in will have the compostibles to themselves for the next few weeks.

I plunge back into my pile with the pitchfork, relishing the simple task of digging through the loose matrix of crumbly proto dirt. I start with right side, which has been left unturned the longest. I pull the bottom layer forward and excavate inward, piling up the tailings across the three other flanks of my pile. I’m happy to see that the compressed leaves I fork out have turned to clod-like chunks that crumble into bits and pieces. A few of the largest pinwheel down to the slopes of my pile and break apart against the ground.

Digging deeper, I come across a few flecks of white shredded paper bound together, a half-pipe of a sunflower stem I’d laid down last fall. Having served its purpose as an air tube, is now turned to a pulpy sliver. The pitchfork tangles on a snarl of fishing line, which I set on top of a log with a few pieces of plastic detritus from the beach. The buckets of seaweed I added to my pile through the fall and winter and even this spring are long gone, save for stray oyster shell and flecks of mica that glisten on the backs of dark moist bits of leaves.

A clump of leaf mold impales itself on the curved tines of the pitchfork. I tease it off; pleasedto find  that it’s warm to the touch. I search for sulfurous spots of matted grass but find only smatterings of yellow-green flecks. My pile has not turned anaerobic, as I’d feared, but has largely burned through the infusions of grass clippings I’ve added to it on through the summer. I come across a pocket of the maple seeds I tossed in recently. They remain obstinately intact, and I take care to rebury them in as deep as I can as I work my way down into the center core of my pile.

I carve a wide hole nearly to the middle center before the top portion topples down into the chasm. My pile is no longer a lasagna-like layering of distinct components but more like brown cottage cheese. Much of it separates through the wide tines of the pitchfork before I can toss it up onto the pile.

With the evening light fading, I decide I’ve made enough progress, and spend a few more minutes scraping the dried chunks of leaves from the perimeter of my pile and tucking them back up into its interior.

Before long, I’ve reconstituted my pile into the squat pyramid that is its natural shape. Freshly aerated and rekindled, the nearly finished compost will continue to churn and burn until there it finishes consuming itself.

My pile, nearly mature, after a thorough turning in mid August.