Really, I was only 2 or 3 but I remember that. It was just me and her so there's no other explanation.
My Daddy farmed tobacco when I was little. Crazy as it sounds, I loved pulling tobacco. My brother went down there for the nabs and Coke, and because he had to I guess, but I really loved to work. Little as I was, I would pull leaves until my arms got so full that I couldn't make it to the slide. Obviously I was a really big help!
I got to do other things too, like picking up leaves in the barn and putting sticks on the stringer. Those are great memories for me.
I think it's because I got my hands in the dirt so much as a kid that I love to work outside now.
I asked my husband to build me a compost bin before his outage started but because of the bad weather, he wasn't able to get around to it. When I saw our chickens hanging out in my pile, I knew I had to do something about it. It just wasn't working anymore.
We used to have a bin but it had gotten so full that it was near impossible to stir up. The more I read about it, the more I knew that that set-up wasn't going to give me the results I was looking for. I dumped it out, which is how I ended up with a sprawled out pile of mess.
On a side note, this is not an instructional post. I truly have no idea what I'm doing so I have no business making suggestions to anybody else. I'm just trying to document my "efforts" here.
Anyway, I know nothing about wood working so I decided to go see if there were any cinder blocks at the barn. Halfway there, I saw a bunch of them at the rock pile between my house and my Daddy's. THIS is truly nature's best playground.
You can't see the whole thing but you really should. If you did, I think you would want to play there too!
Anyway, Brayden and I loaded up a bunch of cinder blocks into the back of the van. I know that's not ideal, but a woman's gotta do what a woman's gotta do.
Then Brayden and I went back to the rock pile and got these rocks. Our compost pile is beside our storage building. There's a gap between the building and the ground on that side so I tried to position the rocks to keep my dirt from sliding under there.
We dug through and got out the good dirt.
I was thrilled to get a whole wheelbarrow full and more! Brayden sifted through this to get out big twigs and other things that hadn't broken down well enough.
The kids loved playing with worms. Playing in the dirt provides great opportunities to talk to them about worm poop and how it helps the soil. We've read about all of this in our worm books so putting their hands in it and picking them out was a great opportunity to bring all that knowledge to life.
As a girl who dug up worms for fishing as a kid, I think worms are cool too!
After we loaded the wheelbarrow down pretty good, I decided to use the wooden beam already there as a boundary...
and I moved another one from behind the chicken coop to close off the opposite side.
I felt really strong, kind of like Shera, Princess of the Universe...but in holey jeans.
Then we started moving cinder blocks. I'm sure there are a hundred methods for doing this that are better than the one I chose, but I decided to just do what I could do with what I had, and get on with it.
And this is what we ended up with.
She's a beauty I know! Try (hard) to contain your envy!
Composting really isn't a pretty business anyway, though. I do have room to move my pile to get to the goods when I want to and for the most part, the chickens have been deterred. I could use some more cinder blocks to complete this grand masterpiece. Until then or until my husband decides to build one, this is where it's at.
On an additional note, my favorite pair of jeans suffered a trauma, a massive blow to the left leg...
But they're okay for farm wear and hiking, and soon they'll be cut-offs anyway.
Happy Spring y'all, and let's get growing!
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| Annacie, bloggy photographer |
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