Lest we forget

 We’ve been fussing and fuming about the weather, especially the recurring snow. Turns out, we seem to have a slight memory issue. We’ve forgotten just how bad it can get. ‘Nuff said:

April 17, 2014

Photo by J. Harrington

At least with the weather we’ve been having, I’m not faced with the frustrations of trying to make compost out of garbage. That comes when the weather warms up more than we’ve seen. Maybe around July or August. Jane Kenyon seems to have shared some of my frustrations. As much as misery may love company, it often just means more teeth grinding because more folks are frustrated. What’s even more amusing, if this were late October and I wanted to go duck hunting, the weather would be ideal for that, but too often during duck season we get spells of “bluebird weather.” Each season offers trials, tribulations and triumphs. It’s up to us to decide which is which.

Potato

Jane Kenyon - 1947-1995

In haste one evening while making dinner
I threw away a potato that was spoiled
on one end. The rest would have been

redeemable. In the yellow garbage pail
it became the consort of coffee grounds,
banana skins, carrot peelings.
I pitched it onto the compost
where steaming scraps and leaves
return, like bodies over time, to earth.

When I flipped the fetid layers with a hay
fork to air the pile, the potato turned up
unfailingly, as if to revile me—

looking plumper, firmer, resurrected
instead of disassembling. It seemed to grow
until I might have made shepherd’s pie
for a whole hamlet, people who pass the day
dropping trees, pumping gas, pinning
hand-me-down clothes on the line.

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Thanks for visiting. Come again when you can.
Please be kind to each other while you can.

Becoming naturalized

Harry the beagle, the Better Half’s new rescue dog, is settling in nicely. There’s still a few adjustments that are needed but the situation looks promising. Yesterday the Better Half got a COVID vaccine booster. Today it was my turn. Our diligence is due in part to self-preservation tendencies and also because we have a one year old granddaughter who’s not eligible yet for any COVID vaccine. Except for the last item, we can add each of these things to our list of what we have to be grateful for this Thanksgiving.

some mushrooms thrive on or near dead wood

Photo by J. Harrington

As of this morning, I’m adding to that list Aldo Leopold’s essay, A Mighty Fortress from A Sand County Almanac. I’ve read and reread his description of the benefits of tree diseases to many forms of wildlife, but it keeps slipping my mind every time there’s a new batch of broken branches covering the driveway and yard. Such was the case this morning after yesterday’s and last night’s storms. That’s when I get tempted to just "get rid of all these dead branches and diseased trees," forgetting once again that nature’s way is not the way of middle-class America’s tendency to excessive neatness.

brush pile and lightning-struck oak

Photo by J. Harrington

Most years by this time the brush pile in the backyard would have been reduced to ashes at least once and maybe twice. The folks at the Xerces Society have educated me to the benefits of brush piles for pollinators and other creatures. We’ll let the brush pile stand throughout winter and, barring the unexpected, let the dead oaks stay as they are. The pileated woodpeckers seem to appreciated that and, no doubt, so do a number of other critters we haven’t noticed.

The Nurse Tree

By Molly Peacock

Why waste away in a box

when you could be a nurse tree?

That’s what they call dead logs:

mushroomeries of the woods.

Your living room’s a wood

of couches, books, and chairs.

You’re dead not at all, but

could you be preparing

for things to grow inside

the chest of the log

you plan to become:

cherished compost heap

where heat turns the brown

mess of feelings, sorry,

that’s peelings, into comp-o-

sition? For we who love

our hands in dirt, a leaf skirt

decomposing seems an ideal

station between this life and

next: I visit your room

as on a forest walk. Passing

a fallen log — is that you? — 

I see a scarlet fungus cap

pop up from friable bark.

********************************************
Thanks for visiting. Come again when you can.
Please be kind to each other while you can.

'Tis the season for turning over new leaf

I suspect that our compost tumbler isn’t creating sufficient heat, despite getting sunlight from late morning through the afternoon. The two chamber bin is sprouting seedlings on the side that’s currently being fed. The side that should be finishing still has corn husks in recognizable sheets. Normally, my reaction to such a situation would be to decide that home composting isn’t worth the bother, especially the part about reducing the sizes of the particles to be composted. These are not normal times and I think I’m about to exercise that aspect of my personality the Better Half refers to as stubborn and I call persistent. We are going to see if this old dog can learn the trick to successful composting.

black bear inspecting compost tumbler

Photo by J. Harrington

From the preliminary research I’ve done online, keeping chickens is one option to composting and I believe the Better Half would approve, right up until the time the local pack of coyotes, or one of the neighborhood bears, ate the flock. We’ve foregone the chickens solution for some time, but that was before the complexities of composting became clearer. The online directions for making compost seem so simple and straightforward. Of course, some of us never bother to read the details and figure out the proper ratio of browns to greens. Perhaps that’s a project for the next rainy day, making a cheat sheet and, maybe, ordering some compost starter?

Now that the pail for holding food scraps and coffee grounds is a size that better matches the opening on the compost tumbler, I spend less time avoiding the mess I used to make with an oversized bucket. This is all beginning to feel suspiciously like organic chemistry lab back when I was in college. Blindly  following instructions one didn’t really understand rarely made for a happy grade on lab work, and the text book and lab seemed to live in entirely separate universes.

Potato

Jane Kenyon - 1947-1995

In haste one evening while making dinner
I threw away a potato that was spoiled
on one end. The rest would have been

redeemable. In the yellow garbage pail
it became the consort of coffee grounds,
banana skins, carrot peelings.
I pitched it onto the compost
where steaming scraps and leaves
return, like bodies over time, to earth.

When I flipped the fetid layers with a hay
fork to air the pile, the potato turned up
unfailingly, as if to revile me—

looking plumper, firmer, resurrected
instead of disassembling. It seemed to grow
until I might have made shepherd’s pie
for a whole hamlet, people who pass the day
dropping trees, pumping gas, pinning
hand-me-down clothes on the line.

********************************************
Thanks for visiting. Come again when you can.
Please be kind to each other while you can.