My Pile: New Vintage

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I take the afternoon off, a Friday of the middle of October, to burn up a half-day of paid time off and enjoy another in a string of fine, warm autumn days by adding the first blush of fall leaves to my pile.

The first tree to give up its leaves is always a swamp maple that rises from the corner of the yard beside the road and leans thickly over the neighbor’s front yard, its roots exposed across the patch of hard, compacted dirt they use to park their cars. The neighbors have already raked the leaves into a tidy pile along the bed of wood chip mulch that separates our yards, a ready-made batch for me to gather onto the old white bedsheet I use to drag the leaves over my pile.

The first load of fall leaves waiting to be added to the beginnings of my pile -- cause for celebration!

The first load of fall leaves waiting to be added to the beginnings of my pile — cause for celebration!

The fluffy load of crimson and gold easily covers the flattened mound of seaweed and mashed up stems of salt marsh grass I’ve gathered from the beach over the past couple of weeks and spread across the fall harvest of spent stalks and vines from the garden and grass clippings from the lawn, newly revived by the cool sunny days of autumn and the crop of fresh compost I lavished upon it last month. I top the rotting mashup of green with a smattering of shredded white paper I brought home from the office and tuck the clippings around the thick sunflower stalk I planted in the middle of my pile. I add an armful of cuttings from the perennial garden, the spent stalks will help keep my growing pile airy until they are crushed into submission by rot and the press of leaves.

I gaze across the backyard. The lawn, a vibrant green, still grows lushly, and only a shady patch under the big sycamore that lords over the front corner of the yard is flecked with fallen leaves, though not enough to bother yet with raking.

Most of the trees in my backyard are still largely green, their roots comforted by the deep topsoil and thick beds of rich mulch, and peak fall color is just now making its way from the northerly parts of New England. Two scraggly maples on either side of the driveway, their root systems impinged by asphalt, are usually next to drop their leaves, most of which fall on the street. The passing traffic breezes the leaves into long windrows along the side of the road, and it takes just a few minutes to rake them up into small collections. Much of the leaves have been pulverized by cars, turning it into flattened arboreal road kill for my pile.

There are just enough leaves to gather to give my pile enough cover for its next deposit: The green plastic garbage can stuffed with the kitchen scraps, compost and sheaves of sycamore bark and paper I started filling in late August, as I began preparing to spread the season’s finished compost throughout the garden and lawn. After topping to the brim of the flip-up handles, the brewing compost within has now settled to about two thirds full, the shredded paper frosting on top now stained the color of tea.

It, along with a second metal can I borrowed from the neighbor last month, is a veritable IED of compost in the making. I drag the plastic can around the side log wall and set it in front of my pile. It’s too heavy to pick up and dump the compost outright, so I stick a pitchfork into the midst and spread steaming forkfuls across the newly deposited leaves. The pounds and pounds of kitchen scraps and last year’s compost sink through the freshly deposited leaves. After a hot month of percolating in a mostly sealed container, the mix is hardly identifiable, though I do spot a couple of corn cobs from a late-summer cookout.

The proto compost I've been brewing in a garbage can for the past month will get my my pile off to a fast start.

The proto compost I’ve been brewing in a garbage can for the past month will get my my pile off to a fast start.

The leaves gathered from along the street are waiting to be tumbled over this mix, and just after I empty the sheetful of crushed leaves, I’m visited by my neighbors, who come bearing a most appropriate gift.

It’s Craig from across the street, who married into a large Sicilian family, with his father-in-law, who makes wine each fall. This year he bought 250 pounds of red grapes, and today he brings over a chilled bottle of his first batch. I head inside to grab wine glasses. Craig has told me his father-in-law has been asking him why my lawn is still so green.

Craig is telling him how I spread the compost across the lawn as I set the glasses on a log beside my pile. The cork from the liter bottle comes out with a pop. I pour a tasting for each of us to salute the harvest of the autumn season. The sparkling ruby red wine is fresh and alive, and strong.

“It needs to breathe,” says Craig says.

“It will mature,” adds Sal, the winemaker in his thick Sicilian accent.

I taste, we clink glasses, and I look over to my pile and nod in happy agreement.

A glass of freshly made wine to toast my pile, which will take much longer to sample.

A glass of freshly made wine to toast my pile, which will take much longer to sample.

My Pile: Color Commentary

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The sun is the guiding light of my backyard and what grows where and when within it. This being southern New England at about 40 degrees latitude — same as Madrid, Naples and Beijing — the sun’s transit across the local sky rises and lowers dramatically through the year, tracking to nearly straight overhead at mid-summer before skimming just above the horizon on a short day in darkest winter.

The sun rules all, and provides all. It gives my yard ample amounts of sun and shade, doling each out through the daylight hours in an ever-changing projection that begins each day with the sun rising over the houses and canopy trees across the street to the east, tracing a path behind the tall line of evergreens that shadow the southern, back border of my property, hovering brightly in the open patch of sky to the southwest before setting behind the oak-lined ridge of glacial-scoured granite ledge that backstops the houses across the street to the west.

The palette of autumn is deepening, with dabs of rust and red and magenta and all hues of yellow and gold and orange spreading pointillist across the summer’s canvas of green. Most of this fall color is still airborne, the collective leaves clinging to their branches they sprung from. The cusp of autumn is the time of year to marvel at the season’s growth of plants and bloom of flower and fruit, a still life of nature that is anything but still.

I have a good idea of how plants grow and why they are green – in a word, because of a magical elixir called chlorophyll – but off the top of my head couldn’t explain why or how their leaves change color. It turns out the experts are still somewhat mystified as well.

“For years, scientists have worked to understand the changes that happen to trees and shrubs in the autumn. Although we don’t know all the details, we do know enough to explain the basics and help you to enjoy more fully Nature’s multicolored autumn farewell,” I read on the U.S. Forest Service’s website. (I figure if anyone knows about trees, it’s the agency that manages nearly 200 million acres of them.)

“Three factors influence autumn leaf color: leaf pigments, length of night, and weather, but not quite in the way we think. The timing of color change and leaf fall are primarily regulated by the calendar, that is, the increasing length of night. None of the other environmental influences — temperature, rainfall, food supply, and so on — are as unvarying as the steadily increasing length of night during autumn. As days grow shorter, and nights grow longer and cooler, biochemical processes in the leaf begin to paint the landscape with Nature’s autumn palette.

A color palette needs pigments, and there are three types that are involved in autumn color.

 
  • Chlorophyll, which gives leaves their basic green color. It is necessary for photosynthesis, the chemical reaction that enables plants to use sunlight to manufacture sugars for their food. Trees in the temperate zones store these sugars for their winter dormant period.
  • Carotenoids, which produce yellow, orange, and brown colors in such things as corn, carrots, and daffodils, as well as rutabagas, buttercups, and bananas.
  • Anthocyanins, which give color to such familiar things as cranberries, red apples, concord grapes, blueberries, cherries, strawberries, and plums. They are water soluble and appear in the watery liquid of leaf cells.

Both chlorophyll and carotenoids are present in the chloroplasts of leaf cells throughout the growing season. Most anthocyanins are produced in the autumn, in response to bright light and excess plant sugars within leaf cells.

During the growing season, chlorophyll is continually being produced and broken down and leaves appear green. As night length increases in the autumn, chlorophyll production slows down and then stops and eventually all the chlorophyll is destroyed. The carotenoids and anthocyanins that are present in the leaf are then unmasked and show their colors.

A branch of dogwood, its leaves deepening in color and its berries ripening a bright red.

A branch of dogwood, its leaves deepening in color and its berries ripening a bright red.

The amount and brilliance of the colors that develop in any particular autumn season are related to weather conditions that occur before and during the time the chlorophyll in the leaves is dwindling. Temperature and moisture are the main influences.

A succession of warm, sunny days and cool, crisp but not freezing nights seems to bring about the most spectacular color displays. During these days, lots of sugars are produced in the leaf but the cool nights and the gradual closing of veins going into the leaf prevent these sugars from moving out. These conditions–lots of sugar and lots of light–spur production of the brilliant anthocyanin pigments, which tint reds, purples, and crimson. Because carotenoids are always present in leaves, the yellow and gold colors remain fairly constant from year to year.

peak-fall-color-mapThe amount of moisture in the soil also affects autumn colors. Like the weather, soil moisture varies greatly from year to year. The countless combinations of these two highly variable factors assure that no two autumns can be exactly alike. A late spring, or a severe summer drought, can delay the onset of fall color by a few weeks. A warm period during fall will also lower the intensity of autumn colors. A warm wet spring, favorable summer weather, and warm sunny fall days with cool nights should produce the most brilliant autumn colors.

In early autumn, in response to the shortening days and declining intensity of sunlight, leaves begin the processes leading up to their fall. The veins that carry fluids into and out of the leaf gradually close off as a layer of cells forms at the base of each leaf. These clogged veins trap sugars in the leaf and promote production of anthocyanins. Once this separation layer is complete and the connecting tissues are sealed off, the leaf is ready to fall.”

And fall they will. And once these technicolor packets of carbon and minerals are swept up and gathered, my pile becomes a kaleidoscope of ever-changing texture and color. Each load of leaves changes its complexion; the electric yellow of the poplar is swamped by a crush of wine-dark japanese maple; some oak is scarlet and green, other leaves are more ruby red. Some leaves haven’t gotten the memo, and remain stubbornly green, and decide to rot before they rust. My pile sucks the verdant green from load after load of fresh grass clippings. They molt to dusky yellow before melting away as ashen scatterings of grey. Yet more color pours into my pile with  every bucket of kitchen slop, bag of shredded paper and bin of seaweed and straw.

The cold rains and hard frosts of fall and winter wash away the last flickers of the vainglorious autumn hues. Like a spilled tray of watercolor paints, the distinctly primary rainbow of pigments that begins as my pile will soon spread into a mush of brown, as dull and uniform in color as it is distinctly rich with decay.

For a brief moment in time my pile turns a pristine, crystalline white. The blanket of snow that melts into my pile each winter is like caramelizing sugar in a cauldron of hot brown butter. As it cooks down on through the warming months of spring, my pile turns from the color of base clay into a deep, rich coffee brown. That’s the color of compost, I suppose. But of my pile? It’s made of every color under the sun.

 

 

My Pile: Ruminations

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Busy as I keep tending to my pile, garden and yard, there are always plenty of moments when I just sit, to rest and reflect.

There are any number of places in the backyard for taking a seat to ponder my pile, the flat lawn and  bushy gardens, and the rising trees that ring the house and property. My property is basically a square piece of flat land that slopes gently front to back, with a small box of a house set in the middle. Surrounding a moat of grass lawn that rings the house and flatstone patio is a  perimeter of mulched garden beds, thickly planted with perennial flowers and shrubs. Rising above them is an array of trees, mostly hardwood but some evergreen, ranging in size from 20 feet tall to more than 80.

A wider canopy of green on the horizon of the neighboring landscape frames the wide swath of sky above.  I view this stretch of open space as my property as well, the air rights that allow me to claim passing clouds, lingering sunsets, circling hawks and fluttering bats as my own.

In the gloaming of a deep summer evening, I sit and watch the flashing legions of fire flies that rise through the twilight, a light show rising into the ether. Sometimes it’s the chase of a visiting hummingbird flitting among the flower heads that keeps me still. If I sit quietly enough, a cautious dove will alight on the flagstone patio to coo over the tiny black seeds dropped in profusion by the gangly cleome that border the vegetable garden.  Not too long ago, I was startled by a red tailed hawk that swooped low over my backyard, a squirming squirrel clutched in its talons.

Though a scene of some industry, there are plenty of perches to take a pause on between backyard chores.

Though a scene of some industry, in my backyard there are plenty of perches to take a pause on between chores.

Other times I heed the sudden downdraft of a chill, ill wind on a muggy summer day, a head’s up  that I have only minutes to take in the branches swaying haphazardly in the gusty breeze, the flashes of lightning approaching from over the distant hill before fat drops of a dousing thunderstorm begin to plop down upon the ground, and bang off roof and driveway. Today I watch as braces of robins skydive into the dogwood to pluck the bright-red berries from bended branches.

I see and use my yard, like most gardeners do, as an outdoor living space, a series of interconnected rooms decorated with plants and hardscapes. Although I have a number of nice chairs on the back porch and patio, a comfy, cushioned wrought-iron lounge chair or two, and even a good sturdy picnic bench in the shade of the backyard, I most often take a perch on a stump or stone. I don’t know why, but I suspect these places make me feel more connected to the yard I keep in the most organic, down-to-earth way. Generally having a pair of clippers tucked in the back pocket of my cargo shorts or jeans or being otherwise grubby may have something to do with it as well.

Two squat logs that begin the twin wood walls that embrace my pile are frequent rest stops. So, too, are the largest rocks that anchor the borders of the flower and fern gardens in three corners of my yard. Each are about as high as a small footstool; I know how sturdy these small boulders are because I dug them out of the ground and rolled them into place. Depending on the day and time and task, any of them make a good perch spend a moment taking it all in. As the years go by and both the garden and I mature, these pauses grow longer, and more frequent.

The view I often find myself taking in is from the fat round chunk of maple, 20 inches tall and nearly as thick, that sits upright along the stockade fence that runs behind my pile. The log has a rotted knot hole big enough to stick my fist in. It’s no good for splitting into firewood but serves as another good rest spot to ruminate upon my pile and beyond it the lawn and garden it rises from and nurtures.

After all, ruminating is what my pile is all about.  From the Latin ruminat – “chewed over” or “to chew repeatedly for an extended period,” as in what cows do to cud, since the 16th century the word has also meant “to turn over in the mind” or “to reflect on over and over again, casually or slowly.”

What I reflect on today is an exotic new contribution that awaits being added to my pile. I’m looking at a bucket packed full of pellet-size poop from a small herd of llamas and alpacas that reside at a nearby nature center. They’re part of a collection of animals of a working demonstration farm. I’d stopped by to find out more about the organic vegetable garden they keep and to inquire about a Master Composter class they offer.

One thing leads to another, and that thing is the heavy bucket of llama “beans” that now sits before me. I find out more on a website kept by Blue Rock Station, a farm in the Appalachian Mountains of southeastern Ohio:

“Llama manure is… simply put… terrific stuff for your plants.  The llama “beans” as they are often called (as they resemble coffee beans, or rabbit poo, or whatever other “bean like” thing you care to imagine) break down slowly, releasing their nutrients into your plants. Other advantages include:

  • almost no smell (ideal for indoor plants)
  • extremely rich in Nitrogen, Phosphorus and Potassium
  • will not “burn” your plants

The smooth green nuggets remind me most of vitamin capsules, only not filled with oily gel but dry. In fact, a member of a compost forum, permies.com, suggests soaking the llama beans to spur their decomposition, so I am happy to let the bucket sit for a week or so while I wait for the leaves to fall en masse. Showers are on the way, and I’ll keep the bucket uncovered to let the coming rain soak in. The llama manure doesn’t smell much more than the sniff of a horse stall.

 

A bucket of newly procured llama poop from a local nature center sits on deck beside my pile, waiting to be added to the rush of fall leaves.

I thought I’d be busy by this time with raking leaves and adding them wholesale to my pile. Looking through my compost journal, I know in years’ past by now sometimes I’ve already gathered heaps of fallen leaves, even spread wood chips across the culled flower beds. The cud for my pile is still clinging to the trees, the leaves still largely as green as the lush grass of autumn growing thick in my yard. Though I plan to mow the yard again this weekend, I have few other pressing chores, so for now I wait and watch and, yes, ruminate.

 

My Pile: Bounty of the Sea

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On the first day of October I load the dog into the car, along with a tennis ball, two empty plastic tubs and a three-pronged hand rake.

Today marks the seasonal re-opening of the town’s beaches to dogs, from now on through March. So to the sea we go.

The dog likes nothing more than to chase a tennis ball across the soft wet sand into the shallow planes of saltwater at low tide. He stops to sniff out all the mysterious scents of the seashore and on occasion to bury his catch in a hole dug along the tidal flat.

I stop at the strandline to fill the buckets with seaweed to ferry home to my pile.

The timing is doubly good: After weeks of dry weather, a coming storm system is set to bring rain to the parched region. Bolstered by a harvest moon, the flood tides have washed up a deep, ragged etching of seaweed and other bounty of the sea.

After giving the dog his run along the beach, I fill the first bucket with a pungent mix of drying seaweed and broken stalks of seagrass. The sand-flecked scrapings are suffused with sea shells, the carapaces and claws of crabs and stray flight feathers, mostly the gray and white quills of seagulls. It weighs about 40 pounds, I figure as it bangs against my hip on the way back to the car. It is ripe enough that I know I will drive home with the windows wide open, the dog’s safety be damned.

Such a batch of seaweed and organic flotsam is a prized addition to my pile, especially at this time of year. I will spread it across the base, which has begun this season first with a rough and tangly layer of spent flower stems and uprooted vines and plants from the garden. I’ve since added a heaping of fresh-cut grass clippings, thick with the rich detritus from when I mowed over the compost cast across the yard.

My goal is to give my pile a rich, green base of highly biodegradable greens before I begin to raise it up out of the ground with load after load of gathered brown leaves. A compost heap too bottom-heavy with leaves risks becoming a dead zone. The leaves compress and entomb themselves, sealed off from air, water and other agents of change, among them me and my pitchfork.

Set on a veritable platter of rich, airy green material, the autumn leaves, I hope, will begin to decompose from below, and the resulting heat and biological activity will filter upward as I continue to layer my pile with fresh additions of all manner of rottable organic material on through the fall and winter months.

My pile's 'sea floor' -- a rich, briny mix of seaweed and seagrass, infused with sea shells, crab claws and cast-off feathers of seagulls.

My pile’s ‘sea floor’ — a rich, briny mix of seaweed and seagrass, infused with sea shells, crab claws and cast-off feathers of seagulls.

The longer I live by the shore of the Long Island Sound, the more I come to respect its riches. And the more I realize that the Sound I know is a shadow of what it once was.

Its productivity was once legend.

In the foreward to Tom Andersen’s “This Fine Piece of Water: An Environmental History of Long Island Sound,” Robert F. Kennedy Jr. writes “how Henry Hudson’s lieutenant Robert Juett described rivers choked with salmon (probably striped bass) and mullet … New Yorkers ate more oysters from the Sound than any other meat, including the East River oyster, now extinct, whose eleven-inch shell housed seven pounds of succulent flesh.

“Two hundred years after contact, the European invasion had little impact on the estuary’s extraordinary productivity. In the Eighteenth Century, enough lobsters still washed ashore each night from natural die-offs to fertilize the coastal farms of Connecticut, New York and Massachusetts.”

Andersen quotes from a journal account by Timothy Dwight, president of Yale University in the early nineteenth century, on the efforts of Long Islanders to improve their agriculture: “[T]he inhabitants … have set themselves to collect manure wherever it could be obtained. Not content with what they could make and find on their own farms and shores, they have sent their vessels up the Hudson and loaded them with the residium of potash manufactories; gleaned the streets of New York; and have imported various kinds of manure from New Haven, New London, and even from Hartford. In addition to all this, they have swept the Sound, and covered their fields with the immense shoals of whitefish with which in the beginning of summers its waters replenished. No manure is so cheap as this where the fish abound; no is so rich; and few are so lasting. Is effects on vegetation are prodigious. Lands which heretofore have scarcely yielded ten bushels of wheat by acre are said, when dressed with whitefish, to have yielded forty. The number caught is almost incredible. It is here said … that one hundred and fifty thousand have been taken in a single draft.”

Over the next century, the Sound’s natural resources were methodically plundered; first beaver and other riverine mammals for their pelts, then deer and larger prey, then seals, then whales, then passenger pigeons and turkeys, once so numerous and unguileful that hunters, Andersen writes, would park a wagon under a tree where turkeys roosted and shoot them all but take only those that dropped directly into the buckboard.

“By the 1920s, the terrapin, duck and lobster populations were in decline, and periodic algal blooms clouded the waters, once gin-clear. F. Scott Fitzgerald christened his contemporary Long Island Sound ‘that great wet barnyard,’ acknowledging its modern function as the primary waste receptacle for the enormous human population now crowding its shores.”

Since then, especially after a disastrous algae bloom in the late 1980s, the Sound has struggled to recover even the barest scraps of its once seemingly endless bounty.

“Long Island Sound’s flounder catch dropped from 40 million pounds in 1982 to one million pounds in 1987. The oyster catch sank from 3 million bushels annually to 15,000,” Andersen reports in his 2002 book, adding, “Most significantly, the Sound has become the Northeast’s sewer. Each day 1 billion gallons of treated sewage pour into the Sound, supplemented by another 18 million gallons of raw sewage…. The result is that Long Island Sound is undergoing an ecological crisis that threatens to turn it into a dead sea.”

Andersen paints a vivid picture of the Sound’s low point, the summer of 1987. An unprecedentedly large algae bloom led to a collapse of oxygen levels. “Hypoxia in the Sound’s center trough spread up and out toward the shoals, linking up with hypoxia in the harbors. Pockets of healthy water that could have provided refuge for fish and lobsters vanished. Blackfish breached the surface, gasping pitifully for air.

“In the newsroom of the New Rochelle newspaper I worked for, I took a call from a man who said he had been fishing at New Rochelle’s Hudson Park the evening before. He heard a curious noise in the dusk and, looking down to the rocks below the sea wall, saw lobsters crawling out of the water.”

Since those dark days, the Sound has recovered, somewhat. Though the lobster – once so plentiful that inmates in New England prisons rioted at being served an endless supply – will never return to the now cleaner but ever-warmer waters, the summer of 2015 saw the first sightings of whales in the Sound in generations; porpoises and seals are also making appearances, lured from the ocean waters off Cape Cod by growing numbers of baitfish, mostly the oil-rich menhaden. Oyster farms are a growth industry, recreational fishing is robust and tightly regulated; beach closings are less common.

“There’s all this life that wasn’t there before,” charter boat captain John McMurray tells environmental reporter Richard Schiffman in a recent New York Times op-ed piece, “Not Just Another Stinky Fish.”

That stinky fish is “menhaden, also known as bunker, or pogies,” Schiffman continues. To the fishermen he spoke to, “there are encouraging signs that the menhaden population along the Atlantic Coast is healthy after decades of intensive commercial exploitation.

“The name menhaden is a corruption of “munnawhatteaug,” which means fertilizer in Algonquian. Native Americans taught the pilgrims to plant them with their corn, enabling colonists to coax a crop from rocky New England soils, according to Bruce Franklin, author of “The Most Important Fish in the Sea.” Manhaden was used as a lubricant, replacing whale oil after the Civil War; today the most of the catch (the largest by weight in the East Coast fishery) is rendered into heart-healthy omega-3 fatty acid fish oil, as well as used to produce fertilizers and high-protein feeds for livestock, reports Schiffman.

Fodder for the game fish sought by sport fisherman, menhaden play an even more fundamental role in preserving the health of the Long Island Sound; swimming in schools of hundreds of thousands. “Mouths agape as them feed, menhaden are living vacuum cleaners sucking up algae blooms that deplete inshore waters of oxygen and create biological deserts in the sea. A single adult menhaden can clean four to seven gallons of water in a minute.”

Just 15,000 years old, and formed by glaciers that scoured the land to the north and left it piled up in ridges to form Long Island, the Sound is a current event, at least in geologic time.

It is also one of the globe’s the most dynamic waterscapes, and may be able to recover further, if we let it. Flushed twice daily by the tides, it features “a greater range of seasonal temperatures than that of any other body of water in the world,” says Tom Andersen, with temperature as low as 32 degrees in winter and as high as 76 in August.

The dog days of summer aside, the dog swims year-round, whether it’s to paddle through the 70-degree surf on the first day of October or a plunge into the icy water of February. He doesn’t know what he’s missing, in terms of the bounty that once lapped upon the shores he trods.

And though its riches now pale in comparison to generations past, the Sound provides me and my pile with more than I can use. I wonder if other backyard gardeners or lcoal farmers reap the sea’s harvest like I do, or if the surplus seaweed raked from the region’s public beaches to keep beachgoers happy is recycled in any productive way.

“The best fertilizer in the world,” says Bull in the Irish film The Field. Seems a shame to let all that seaweed rot on the beach when it could be put to use renovating nearby landscapes that have been degraded over the years by the careless hand of man just as much as the provident local sea.

I’m hopeful. As another close watcher of the Sound once wrote, “Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that’s no matter—tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther. . . . And one fine morning—

So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”

My pile typically begins each fall with a "sea floor" of seaweed, shells and crab carapaces culled from the strandline of the nearby beach.

My pile typically begins each fall with a “sea floor” of seaweed, shells and crab carapaces culled from the strandline of the nearby beach.

My Pile: Good Bones

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The first weekend day of fall begins like yet another morning from the summer just past – warm, dry and sunny.

Though the weather may be stuck in a holding pattern –a pleasant one at that – there are chores to be done in the backyard, garden and compost pile.

The dog likes nothing better than the sight of me on the back porch lacing up my work shoes. I feel the same way.

My main Saturday chore is to mow the lawn. After aerating and overseeding three weeks ago, I’ve since watered plenty in the absence of any significant amount of rain. The grass has grown long and tangly, and at last a storm is forecast to head up the Atlantic Seaboard by mid-week.

While I wait for the morning dew to dry, I busy myself finishing up some procrastinated gardening chores, which in my Connecticut backyard means moving rocks. Over the course of season of aerating, weeding, transplanting and pruning, I’ve unearthed a load of new stones to repurpose and also exposed some needed hardscape repairs.

First I reset and enlarge the rock pathway along the side of my house that leads to the water hose and garbage can. Nothing against gardeners who busy themselves with annual plantings, but I tend to focus on the “bones” of my property. Like any gardener or otherwise domesticated housekeeper, taking out the trash or watering the plants is a most utilitarian area, which deserves upkeep and the occasional facelift. Now’s the time to do it before the leaves fall, my pile fills up and the ground freezes rock-solid.

Having already cleared the approach of encroaching pachysandra, I haul a few pieces of flat scheist from the stack of unearthed rubble rock I keep in a corner of the yard. I figure the flat, grainy stone chunks cleaved off eons ago from the glacial-scrubbed ridge that stretches behind the homes across the street. Or they may be from loose fill trucked in in the early 1950s to build up this marshy lowland onion field into a building lot on an old valley road. Whatever their provenance, they have a new setting as I plant them in a mix of sand, compost and topsoil. I’ll now have a clear and easy path to take when I haul out the garbage on a dark winter’s night.

Compost helps fill in around the stone steps leading to the water hose and garbage can, as well as the track the dog has made through the pachysandra.

Compost helps fill in around the stone steps leading to the water hose and garbage can, as well as the track the dog has made through the pachysandra.

Another garden task, one that I hope will pay dividends over the long haul: Along one side of my property is a swath of privet bushes, long grown tall as small trees. I’ve kept them largely untended as a screen to my side neighbor’s house, which is just a few feet beyond the fence that divides our properties. An introduces species of an semi-evergreen shrub found throughout Asia, privet has long become an American landscape fixture, defining Southhamption estate and suburban backyard alike. I admire how it has set down such deep American roots.

Each summer the privets’ fast-growing limbs hang heavy with white flowers, which in turn produce heavy boughs of purple berries late in the winter that the early-arriving robins gorge on while they’re waiting for the yard to thaw and give rise to the earthworms they seek most of all. The berries the birds don’t pick ultimately drop down into the thick bed of rotting wood chips and compost mulch.

Just as well; I read that with certain types of privet, the berries are mildly toxic to humans, though the Chinese have long used privet bark and leaves in herbal medicine as cures for everything from chapped lips to chronic bowl problems. The fast-growing branches I prune each year make privet a great green security fence; the flexible, reedy twigs are also used as cords for lashing in other cultures, which is why I don’t turn the branchy clippings into my pile but instead haul them off to the local yard-refuse center for recycling.

In any event, each year I get a crop of vigorous weedlings of the profilgate privet, which I pluck out of the ground with a dandelion digger and transplant along the back side of my property.

Soon after moving in a decade ago, I had a wooden stockade fence set in place along the rough, shady line of trees and bushes that separate the edge of my backyard and the neighbor’s house, just two or three paces beyond. Knowing that the wooden fence will last only a few more years before rotting away in the damp shade, at its base I’ve begun to create what I hope will be a new, living screen of privet.

It’s the sort of silly little backyard project that I think most avid gardeners will recognize: A good-faith effort to make use of a garden material in abundant supply – in my case, spindly little privet sproutings – in hopes that over the years the effort will pay off in a useful  garden fixture – a dense screen of living green.

Over the past few seasons, I’ve dug up as many small privet plants as I can find that have sprouted in the mulch of the perennial flower garden, to transplant the bare-root striplings alongside their earlier kin in the deep bed of wood chips I’ve long piled up against the fenceline. I water the spindly little invasives into bare spots up and down the budding hedgerow. Privet being as hardy as it is unappetizing to deer, I know most will take root and survive –but whether they grow thick enough to become a living replacement for the rotting stockade fence will probably be for the next homeowner to decide.

The puny privet hedge taking root in the wood-chip mulch and shade along the stockade fence that bounds the backyard and my pile.

And that’s the thing about tending a suburban property. Yes, I own the house and its grounds, or at least share ownership with the mortgage lender. But I am fully aware that I am only a temporary caretaker, at least in the timeframe that nature keeps.

My backyard, and at the heart of it, my compost pile, is a hobby farm of very modest proportions – not much more than a third of an acre. I’ve designed and keep up the yard according to my wants and whims, to be a playground and refuge for me and my son, a robust habitat for native flora and fauna, a family footprint of carbon and other essentials that is sustainable and livable.

My goal is to give my yard the best bones I can, for the larger and greater sense, I’m just a short-term tenant of my property, which I intend to leave in better shape than I found it. Another homeowner could, and probably will, change the property as much as I have – the stones I set in place are steps that are fleeting even for me. I can only hope that the hardwoods that I’ve nurtured, the oak and beech and hickory, will grow tall enough before I leave to be lasting replacements for the swamp maples and other trash trees I inherited.

The backyard I tend is a long way from achieving any sort of Permaculture status, but what my pile has contributed to it over the past decade, the tonnage of new compost, rich in carbon and nutrients it’s added, will pay dividends for decades.

Setting stone pathways, pruning bushes, raking leaves and mowing the lawn may seem like jobs to outsource and then cut a check for. The price of being a homeowner, I guess.

But not me. I can’t wait to haul the mower out of the shed. Even better, when I pull the grass catcher from its hinge, to remove the duct tape I’d used a month ago to seal it, I find the slanted bag half full.

Inside are the dusty remains of my mowing in the compost over the lawn a week ago. I can’t think of a better addition to my nascent pile than a batch of highly sifted mature compost and dried grass clippings. I empty the bag atop the tangled limbs of tomatoes and spent stalks of herbs and flowers, shoring up the stout sunflower stem that rises from the very base of my brand-new pile.

I tear off the ragged strips of duct tape from the mower’s open end, set the blade up a notch and fire up the Toro. I start under the sycamore tree, which has already dropped a dappling of leaves, and quickly fill the grass catcher. I pour the mix of chopped leaves and fresh blades of grass over my pile.

I'm starting my pile off with a base of chopped up grass clippings and leaves.

I’m starting my pile off with a base of chopped up grass clippings and leaves.

In all, I add three more catchers’ worth of fricasseed leaves and grass to the base of my pile, and leave as least as much to the yard. The verdant patches of green make great, pocket-sized playing fields for my son and dog, the neighbors and me. But the thick grass lawn also yields its own surplus crop of nutrient-rich material that I am happy to harvest. You don’t have to own a 40-ft. wide combine to feel like a farmer. Sometimes a 2-ft. wide Toro will do.

It’s a good start to my pile, and to the fall.