Summer

My Pile: Fire Works

Posted by

0

I return home from work early this afternoon. It’s a getaway Friday, before the Fourth of July holiday weekend. I’m hoping to take a long overdue walk at the beach after work, in advance of the next night’s big fireworks display at the local beach, which each year attracts thousands of people.

First, I head out to the shed to grab the plastic barrel. Though the long hot days of summer have slowed the growth of grass in my yard, they’ve also warmed the shallow waters of the nearby Sound, leaving the local beaches awash with seaweed. I know from years past that the town tidies up the beach before the fireworks by dragging a mechanical sifter across the sand. I hoped I’m too late to do some beachcombing of my own.

The lawn is awash in blooms of white clover flowers, which I’m happy to leave uncut for the bees to sup upon. I don’t know how much more fresh hot “greens” my pile needs, but I like the idea of finishing off my pile as I started it – with “the best fertilizer there is” – seaweed from the beach.

As Mike McGrath writes in the “Book of Compost,” “Seaweed contains trace elements, micro-nutrients and plant growth compounds you’ll never find in any chemical fertilizer – or even in most organic ones. Research performed at Clemson University found that seaweed contained at least 70 trace elements vital to plant growth – in just the tiny amounts plants like best.

The plant-growth compounds in seaweed can speed up flowering and fruit production and help plants better resist stress—especially the stress of cold weather … . Seaweed can really boost yields as well—one study found that seaweed-fed plants produced a third more tomatoes than non-seaweeded plants; and in another study, seaweed increased strawberry yields an astounding 133 percent. Yow!”

After my stroll along the sand I haul the barrel out to the high-water line and scoop up a load of rotting, pungent seaweed. I top off the barrel with a heaping of old seagrass stems, chopped by the surf into tangles of short, hollow straws. Once buried deep in my pile, the pixie-sticks of seagrass will also help aerate the innards and regulate the final decomposition of the compost.

“You want some heat,” advises Stu Campbell in “Let It Rot,” who adds, “heating can be tricky if it gets out of control. Earthworms are killed at 130 F, and they will not stick around and endanger themselves for very long in temperatures that even approach that figure. Azobacteria, the precious microorganisms that transform nitrogen gas into a form that plants can use, are killed at temperatures above 160 F. Excessive heat is far more dangerous than no heat at all.”

As I plan to use this year’s batch of humus to invigorate my lawn, I want all the nitrogen I can beg, borrow or steal. That’s one reason I’ve let the clover grow in patches across the lawn; their leguminous roots help lock up nitrogen. I can tell my grass could use more nitrogen – the patch of thick green grass below the hanging bird feeder tells me that. A winter’s worth of bird droppings has been well-received. And though my lawn could stand for mowing, I decide to wait, after seeing more bees than before hovering about the clover flowers that are springing up across the lawn. Besides, it’s more fun to walk the sea shore than the backyard behind a mower.

Returning home from the beach with plenty of daylight left, I find that my across-the-street neighbor, Craig, has mowed his lawn and heaped the grass clippings at the base of my pile. I set about my evening chores to mix in the grass and the seaweed, along with a week’s worth of kitchen scraps, into my pile. Having excavated the left side of my pile a week ago, today it’s time for the flip side.

As I prepare to dig into the right side of my pile, my neighbor Chylla comes by with a special request that makes the job easier. After several years of talking about creating a garden in her own yard, she has finally done it. She walks me to the side of her house, where she has dug up the ground along where the fireplace chimney, painted white, rises from the foundation. A small pile of unearthed shard of clay pots includes a set of horse shoes, crusted with rust. No doubt the play set had been set aside many years ago, and then lost to weeds and time.

She has already planted free seed tidy rows of baby swiss chard and spinach, and nearby are various pots containing herbs — I see sage and rosemary — which she wants to plant in the freshly dug ground.  It will make a fine kitchen and herb garden, but what it needs now is a generous helping of compost.

Wheelbarrows of raw compost from my pile make a welcome addition to my neighbor's new garden.

Wheelbarrows of raw compost from my pile make a welcome addition to my neighbor’s new garden.

It’s only fair: For years my pile has thrived on the voluminous scraps from her home-cooked kitchen, as well as raked leaves from her bare-swept front yard. In return, she has an open invitation to gather fresh pickings from the garden, and does so on a daily basis. But until now, aside from a few plant containers and clay pots to fill, she’s never had a place in which to share compost from my pile.

And that, I have in spades. Returning to my pile, I haul out the wheelbarrow and set in front of heap and plunge into the right front corner with the manure fork, turning out cavalcades of dark, rich proto-humus. My pile is more like dirt than leaves, and as with the wheelbarrow of compost I’ve already added to my own ripening vegetable garden, I’m happy to have reason to move the near-finished compost once.

I dig into the front right side of my pile, teasing out mature compost with the straight tine manure fork. The compost crumbles, and I use the spade to fill up with wheelbarrow. The only screening I do is to flick a few clumps of pressed leaves onto the top of the heap. I trundle the first load to the yard next door and spoon out compost across the new garden beds, and return twice more to leave my neighbor with her new garden beds chock-full of compost to work into the soil.

The borrowings from my pile have carved out a tunnel into the right front corner, revealing the dark inner core. To gain ready access to the cliff-face of compost along the rest of the right side of my pile I turn out the log wall, twisting and teeter-tottering them to the ground.

I've toppled the log walls that contain my pile to gain access to the right side.

I’ve toppled the log walls that contain my pile to gain access to raw brown material — mostly leaves from last fall — on the right side.

To slow walk my pile from one side to the other, I pull clumps of decaying leaf mold from the center of the pile up against the left side, creating space to heap more unearthed compost from the bottom right side, mixing in fresh scraps of grass clippings and pulled weeds. I use the short-tined pitchfork to tease out forkfuls of autumn leaves flecked with sand from the many loads of seaweed deposited last fall.

This is the cold-pressed part of my compost heap, which over the past six months has slowly decomposed under the press of leaves and mixings above it. I toss the cool, danks forkfuls of leaf litter across the growing mound on the left side of my pile, briefly exposing them to fresh air and sun for the first time since November before burying them anew under further heapings of more mature compost gleaned from the front and back sides. Much of my pile is now a rich mix of crumbly leaf mold and grass clippings. The few whole leaves that remain from last fall will soon succumb to the decay now going on at a fever pitch within the tossed sections of my pile.

All this work on my pile attracts the attention of my neighbor Craig, who wanders over to watch as I tuck his grass clippings deep within my pile. He volunteers to retrieve the remote thermometer sensor he keeps in the dashboard cubby of his car. He owns a foam-installation business, and uses the pistol-shaped device to measure radiant heat.

I dig out a small bore hole in the front face of my pile, and he clocks it with his temperature gun, the digital readings flicking 119, 123, 114, 124. Cool! I dig a little deeper and a 128 pops up. I fear for the safety of the earthworms but take some measure of pride in creating a hot-house of a heap.

My pile is chugging along quite nicely. Here I've clocked it at a toasty 124 degrees.

My pile is chugging along quite nicely. Here I’ve clocked it at a toasty 124 degrees.

I return to my excavations, and in short order my pile is reconstituted. The left side, newly infused with a rich mixture of grass clippings, seaweed and kitchen scraps, rises tall. The right side is a shear cliff-face of dark, rich leaf mold, which has been steadily decaying since last fall, a cold press of compost, which I’ll dig into after the next time I mow. Once exposed to fresh air and mixed with grass clippings, it will go on the fast-track of disintegration, joining the rest of the heap as crumbly compost, well on the way to fruition as humus. New soil, from old life.

As my pile burns through this combustible mix, soon I’ll trade in the pitchfork for a shovel, and my pile will be no more.

“I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I love,
If you want me again look for me under your boot-soles.

You will hardly know who I am or what I mean,
But I shall be good health to you nevertheless,
And filter and fibre your blood.”

So wrote Walt Whitman wrote in Song of Myself.

I celebrate myself, and sing myself,
And what I assume you shall assume,
For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.

Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)”

 

 

My Pile: Scratching the Surface

Posted by

0

It’s a Friday in late June, a midsummer night’s eve to enjoy with some idle yardkeeping. In my backyard, cocktail hour is garden hour, and unwinding from the workweek by reconnecting with the ground I keep is a pleasure, especially at this time of year when the plants are intoxicated with new growth.

I stop by my pile before ducking into the shed to collect some pruning tools. I’m surprised at how little it has settled after the last big deposit and dig-out of the left side, even after a soaking rainstorm earlier in the week. My pile is in its cups as well, positively Falstaffian in its fulsomeness.

The leaf litter across the rounded surface is moist and crumbly, mottled clumps of caked-together leaves bound with layers of proto-dirt. My pile now has its own heft, and the whole lot is well on its way to recomposing itself as a matrix of new earth — humus — that I can shovel instead of pitchfork. In no small way, it’s something I don’t want or need to mess with right now. It is its own thing at the moment, a complete ecosystem of teeming life, best left to its own biological devices.

Especially when my pile is damp with rain, it takes only a scrape with a rake or pitchfork to uncover all manner of centipedes, rolly-pollies, skinny red worms and fat racers. It fascinates me to see how much life is contained within my pile, even just scratching the surface.

Each morning and evening when I let the dog out the back door, he makes a beeline for the back corner of the yard and circles around my pile. Sometimes he chases off a squirrel or sniffs out a chipmunk, but more often on these mid-summer days, morning and night, he gives flight to two or three robins that have taken to perching on the log walls beside the pile. I can see tell-tale signs that they flick about the surface of my pile, scattering flecks of leaf litter in search of easy pickings.

Not unlike the robins, I inspect the surface of my pile each time I visit, plucking out and flicking away the twigs and wood chips that continually bob up like corks to the surface. I seldom notice those woody chunks and stems when I rake up the leaves from the yard each fall. Maybe some fall directly from the overhanging maple that shades my pile; most get hoovered up when I pass the mower along the mulched garden beds. But still, these stray pieces remind me that a leaf really is just the tip of the spear, and the trees in my yard continually crop themselves by shedding bark and limbs and branches, which fall to the ground to be broken down further by hand or blade. I pick them off as a habit all through the winter and spring and toss the pieces to the side, their dark moist color standing out from bed of the sun-bleached wood chips spread between my pile and tool shed.

An oblique view of my pile from a couple years ago. At this point in the season it is a squat, rounded mound of nearly finished compost.

Each chip I toss aside is one less piece I’ll need to screen the finished compost come the time to disperse it across my lawn, a laborious task I rarely bother with anyway. Mostly such grooming is my way to stay connected with my pile, by hand, much in the same way I enjoy picking up seashells and curious rocks at the beach, or plucking rocks from the lawn heaved up by the spring thaw. A touch is sometimes all it takes to stay connected, bonded. Ask any chimp.

My pile gives me much pleasure, in the way that a backyard sandbox once entertained my boy, a world unto its own, full of imaginings and possibilities.

The recent hard-pounding rain has exposed, like it always does, a fresh smattering of wood chips and twigs gathered to flick away. Flotsam and jetsam from the beach constantly reveal themselves as well; the rubber heel to a flip-flop, a stretchy wristband and other scraps of plastic are tossed aside as well, to be taken back inside to the garbage can in the kitchen. Tonight’s surprise find is a salad fork, likely discarded from a dinner plate hastily scraped off by one of the neighbor’s girls and dumped into the waste bucket. Its tines are crusted with humus; I’ll stick it in the dishwasher before returning it, once again shiny and stainless, to the family next door. My pile is nearly done. I can tell that not by sticking a fork in it, but by pulling one out.

In no small way, I want to delay the end game, to string out my pile for as long as I can. Over the past six months I’ve mixed into the base heap of autumn leaves hundreds and hundreds of pounds of reclaimed green organics, from kitchen, lawn and garden, beach and barn. I’ve turned and aerated the top and front and back and left side. Next will I will plunge into the right side, squaring the circle that is my pile with pitchfork and rake.  It’s the final untouched quadrant of my pile, and once I turn it up and over, I will have handled most every inch of my pile, save for the very bottom core. Though I’ve scratched the surface of my pile through and through, deep inside it is a time capsule of compost undisturbed since late last fall. No doubt there will be new surprises to come across, along with a rich supply of humus I had no hand in making. My pile always does its own thing, and that thing is turning the rot of old life into living new soil.

I’ll harvest a small portion for the vegetable garden, adding shovels of nearly finished compost around the tomato plants and along the rows of salad greens to keep the weeds at bay and the soil from baking in the hot summer sun. The rest I will soon broadcast across the yard and mulch into the turf — a labor of love but laborious, too. And then, my pile will be no more.

So for now, I am content for my pile to stay itself, in all its glory.

 

My Pile: Hump Day

Posted by

0

It’s hump day. This pleasant Wednesday evening in June marks the summer solstice as well. The Earth’s axis is now tilted as far as it can go toward the sun, which makes it hump day for the whole year. As far as daylight goes, it’s all downhill from here until the darkest, shortest day of December.

Tonight the solstice and full moon coincide—a rare event, The Old Farmer’s Almanac tells me, one that hasn’t happened in nearly 70 years. The Almanac further informs, “The month of June’s Full Moon’s name is the Strawberry Moon. June’s Strawberry Moon got its name because the Algonquin tribes knew it as a signal to gather ripening fruit. It was often known as the Full Rose Moon in Europe (where strawberries aren’t native) and the Honey Moon.”

I make hay of the longest day of the year by mowing the lawn after work, decapitating a galaxy’s worth of round white clover flowers and collecting three hoppers of grass clippings for my pile. Once again I mow around the several small island meadows left to grow in the middle of the lawn. The uncut stalks of grass have turned tawny brown and bow their seedheads with the breeze. I spot a bee or two hovering above the dense crop of clover that’s making rough green mounds of the meadows, and, nearby, a few butterflies nosing about in the garden to help with pollinating duties.

Tipping two logs to their sides gives me insider access to my pile.

Tipping two logs to their sides gives me insider access to my pile.

I consider my stout, rounded hump of a compost heap. Over the past few sessions I’ve thoroughly worked the front and back sides, strip-mining the flanks to aerate and mix it full of fresh clippings from the yard and kitchen and dried brown leaves gleaned from the corners. It’s time to shift my pile from side to side.

Having gouged out the lower corners of my pile for crumbly old leaf mold to cut the grass clippings with, I’ve already exposed most of the log walls, leaving only a reach of about three feet of untouched compost bound in by the two rows of stacked old logs.

I start in on the left side, digging along the log wall with the hay pitchfork, heaping the heavy clumps of pressed leaves onto the top center of my pile. I tease out a few pockets of tinder-dry leaves and pine needles, tossing them like confetti across the top of my pile, but most I pry out thick wads of leaf mold, damp and crumbly and well on the way to rot, which I mix in thin layers of grass clippings grow my pile ever higher and steeper.

I channel my way from front to back. My pile also feeds off the decay of the log wall that contains it, themselves well on the way to rotting. The deeper I go, the richer the compost.

My neighbor has brought by two large plant containers with the request to for me to fill so she can plant with basil. This rich dark leaf mold isn’t quite humus yet, nor a total substitute for planting soil, but will make a good amendment and filler for the bottom of these vats. I fill them near full and haul out my own wheelbarrow. This proto compost will make good top dressing for my vegetable garden. Consider it the first pour, a sample of all the humus to come.

This is the hard labor part of tending an active, hot compost heap, especially one that wanders in place. I’m happy to have to move this batch of compost only once, to my garden. I still have a lot of my pile to get into and move around, and a lot of grass clippings and kitchen waste to dispense with. It’s tough work, working in the cramped space between the log wall, to unpack the compressed leaf mold from underneath the crush of compost above it. I feel like a miner working a seam of coal, and I turn out clump after clump of peat-like proto-compost.

This where my inputs of manual exercise, my sweat equity, pay off. I divert the crumbliest to the wheelbarrow, and cast the coarser snatches across a new trench I’ve opened along the backside of my pile, mixing the cool dank mass with the week’s kitchen scraps and regular dousings of freshly clipped grass. Hump Day, indeed.

At last I create a foot-wide gap that spans the length of my pile and the log wall long stacked against it.  The left side is revealed in cross section, a thick stack of cold-pressed compost that begs to be teased out and turned. This Humpty-Dumpty of a pile needs a great fall.

I teeter to their sides two logs midway on the left side and standing perpendicular to the wall of newly exposed compost, I step in close with the pitchfork and gouge a hole starting from the inside middle. The bound layers of seaweed and leaves laid down early last fall are now compressed into a dark moist stack, like so much meat on a shawarma spit. I unbound the pressed leaf mold and turn it loose onto the top and backside of my pile.  I heap these leaves into a trench I’ve formed along the backside to bury the kitchen waste, mixing the oldest part of my pile with the newest.

I've dug a trench along the log wall that contains my pile to heap the near-finished compost on the top and back side of my pile.

I’ve dug a trench along the log wall that contains my pile to heap the near-finished compost on the top and back side.

At last I’ve chiseled deep enough into the bottom side of my pile so the overhanging matrix of leaves and past mixings collapse in a tumble. I set the two logs back in place and draw more of the newly expunged compost up against them, adding the rest of the grass clippings to the mix. I feel a bit like Beetle Bailey, digging a foxhole only to fill it back up.

With the rise of the full Honey Moon nearing, I scrape the last of the grass clippings from the front of my pile and toss them over the top and left flanks. I’ve carved out about a third of the left side of my pile and much of the backside, and backfilled it all with tossed layers of rotted leaves, fresh grass clippings and kitchen scraps. My pile now a slightly lopsided version of its former self, leaning to the right, though taller and much suffused with air and freshly mixed compostibles. It turns out you can put Humpty-Dumpty back together again, after all.

Rain is forecast for the weekend, which I hope will slake my pile’s thirst and ensure a further crop of lush green grass. The next time I mow the lawn and dig into my pile, it will be from the right side. Only the very bottom center of my pile will then remain untouched, as all else above and around it has been revealed and mixed into a mulch of old brown and new green, churning and burning with a hot riot of bugs and bacteria and all the other creative acts of biological decomposition. My pile is over the hump, and well on its way to fruition.