Dirt Nasty

I am falling in love again and my mistress is soil. When we moved in during the cold days of December, I remember being chiefly focused on staying warm. Felling old trees, splitting the resulting stumps and chunks, stacking the wood to season and waiting for the chimney sweep seemed like the most important things in the world. Fortunately, we had the chance to save all the precious wood chips that resulted from one of April's old school buddies taking down 5 oak and pine trees. It was unceremoniously dumped into a pile next to the chicken coop that lay covered in snow for most of the last 2 months. Now as the spring sun has thawed both the earth and my body back into life and activity, I have become obsessed with creating the most massive and fertile pile of compost in Caldwell County. Since we moved in, we have diverted nearly everything that passes through the kitchen not consumed by us or the boys into a compost bin. I have consolidated all the piles of raked and blown leaves into a massive pile of mulch right by the woodchip pile and supplemented with all the straw and manure I cleaned out of the barn. Today, I tested our soil using a little $3 kit we found at the Tractor Supply. It was the kind of fun reminiscent of middle school science lab collecting the dirt and mixing it with 5 parts water then pouring the resulting muck into test tubes before adding the magic powder that would tell us our pH and NPK levels. Everything came out pretty good, except for the nitrogen levels which are either non-existent or proof that I really should leave anything science related to April. I will bring in the tubes and ask the county agricultural agent, Seth Nagy, tomorrow when I begin my Master Gardener class. I am really excited, feeling like April must have when she got into Stanford. I found out about the class from April's brother's girlfriend, Carolyn, but when I handed in my application; I was told that the class was full and I was 4th on the waitlist. I knew I could really use some education on things like pruning, soil, insects, pesticides, fruit trees and plant diseases but I resigned myself to internet research and whatever I could find in the library of survival books I have amassed waiting for Armageddon to kick off. Anyways, I was in the midst of spraying our fruit orchards with dormant tree oil when I got an unexpected phone call from the county ag agent. A bunch of grannies had decided they would rather keep knitting or playing bingo, so I had vaulted from wait list wannabe to future MASTER GARDENER! With a chesire cat grin, I went back to winding the 3 separate hoses I had merged together into a 300ft mega-hose through the maze of trees in the orchard spraying the oil which is supposed to kill the "bad" insects seeking to prey on my tasty peaches & cherries (but in an organic, friendly way.) Honestly though, sometimes I get in kind of a funk trying to figure out what to do with the freedom of my days, almost longing for the time when someone was telling me what to do and why I was doing it wrong. Today over a lunch of chicken burger quesadillas; I was getting some ideas on a gardening forum when I found a dude named Tim from Illinois who is taking the art of compost to a level I can only aspire to. His writing is powerful and rings with the honesty of hard won experience, sort of like Hemingway if he only wrote about dirt...he also takes insane pictures of his compost piles which are probably larger than the city block we lived on in San Francisco. I highly recommend you check out any of his manifestos archived here:
Forerunner's Compost and threads
After I finished reading & eating, I was reinvigorated and charged back outside with my pitchfork flipping the compost pile like a man possesed. Turning in all the kitchen waste I had stored up and topping it off with a wee bit of urine to achieve just the right nitrogen/carbon balance. It's not gross, it's earthy...and I love it.