An Active Spring Beckons

Last summer’s westward move had so severely tested my powers that at the end I simply failed in strength and in determination to move the sturdy (if decaying) compost heap I’d built oh a decade or so before. But now that we are settled, and the weather warming, I’m about to make up for that failure by building a new one. It will pretty much resemble the old. With that in mind I found an old picture which I’m showing this morning by way of foreshadowing things to come.

This isn’t an aesthetic but a practical matter. And seen from that perspective our compost heap, as this structure has been called, is a thing of beauty. I spent my morning trying to remember the exact measurements of that thing. After I build the new one, no doubt the measurements of the old one will fall into my hands again in some ancient folder—and a cackling laugh of amusement will be heard inaudible somewhere over my head. But so things go unless you are excessively pedantic and orderly.

Lovely thing, isn’t it? Along with that step forward (or back into the blissful past), our huge yard,  compared to the postage stamp that served us for a quarter century on McKinley Avenue, confronts me everywhere with challenges galore so that an active Spring beckons in 2015 so that, by the time our first anniversary in Wolverine Lake arrives at least a start has been made to initiate this strange new Eden into the ways we pursue: the random-seeming order of a Butterfly Ranch. Now whether or not the butterflies will also oblige us in due time, that still remains to be seen.

Compost

Late each spring, as Brigitte girds herself for about the fifth round of serious garden work, I have to fetch her a wheel-barrow-full of fresh black dirt from that shaded, dark strip of land from behind our garage. We have a compost heap although “heap” isn’t the right word. It is a rectangular frame of wood I’d covered with wire mesh when first I made it, oh, a decade or so ago. Here we dump our vegetable wastes and empty the mower’s grass bag. The rack has a great capacity to digest such waste. Its level rises and then slowly sinks again as rot and decay turn lower layers grayish-yellow and then black with rain and time. Once every year or so, this time of year, I dig a big hole in the back to fill the barrow. The new dirt then serves to fill the pots and to enrich our flower-beds. I fill the hole again from the compost heap, lifting oddly shaped pitch-forks full of stuff from its upper layer and burying them again out back. I mark the spot with a brick. The stuff will lay there for three years and, in the process, turn into black dirt again.

Three years ago we had a fun surprise. Some pumpkins seeds we had discarded in the wake of Halloween had managed to sprout deep inside the compost, looked through the wire mesh and then proliferated from that spot out- and downward so that a gigantic pumpkin vine eventually grew right on the concrete and produced two lovely pumpkins once again. This happened again the following year and—this spring—we wondered: would the pumpkin be back? Well it is back—but just beginning. The picture shows its green hopes sticking out, past the wire. Those of you who’re interested in the deepest levels of civilization may rest assured. I shall report on the Pumpkin’s Progress in the future with words and pictures.

Meanwhile, for the third year in a row, I’ve left the bottom layer of the compost heap entirely undisturbed lest I interfere with the life of one splendid specimen of Cucurbita pepo. Long live the pumpkin!