Re: [CH] Expression
danceswithcarp (dcombs@bloomington.in.us)
Mon, 21 Feb 2000 10:59:49 -0500
From: "Sera phim" <seraphim@gardener.com>
> In answer to your comment and question about the
> manure, it goes back to more primitive days, so to
> speak, when you cleaned out the barn, you had hot
> manure. You do not put hot manure on the garden
> because it can kill the seeds and young plants.
> The manure needs to be aged, depending on what
> kind it is, and what it is mixed with. So if you
> have some hot manure, it needs to be put in an
> aging system in order to age it properly and make
> it safe for your seeds and plants. Not all manure
> is hot. It depends on the species of animal and
> what they have been eating.
Yulp. I was going to comment on this when it came by the first time but
repressed the childhood memories. I have 7 brothers and sisters and
everybody was sort of responsibile for everyone else during the summer
school vacations, but to make sure we didn't get bored Pop would leave
garden-chores so he could see what we'd done during the day. He had this
fiendishly evil idea that the sucker-stalks coming off of the sides of corn
needed torn off as these somehow used energy and water that ought to be used
in producing the corn ear. Since there were 8 kids and we were poor, well,
Pop planted a lot of corn and there was tons of "suckering" to be done. I
grew up wearing corn-leaf scratches and cuts during the summer almost as if
they were as natural as sunburns.
Pop would plant 4 or 5 different plantings of corn so it ripen at different
times: "Kids, we'll have corn all summmer..." he'd say.
No way. I swear that no matter what he did that corn would all get ripe at
once and we'd gorge ourselves on it for a couple of weeks and then it was
gone and there would be no more corn-on-the-cob for another year. I wrote
a line once for a newspaper column, "I doubt I will ever smell a smell so
sweet as the corn that cooked during the summer on my mother's stove..."
Anyways, back to manure. We had chickens and a cow too. One mission he
had for us to ensure we never got bored was wandering about the one-acre
cow-pasture pitchforking the cow-pies into a whellbarrow. I became quite
the expert at time-dating the cowpies in their various stages of
dehydration. But it didn't matter how old they were, we'd have to dump the
wheelbarrow full of cow-pie into a pile and let it weather for a winter
before we'd spread it on the garden in the next spring. My brother still
uses a variation on this aging technique by making "Manure Tea" in the
spring out of the aged cow dung to spread on his garden.
The Killer Of All Summer Jobs though, was cleaning out the chicken house.
Man, that was brutal. The chicken manure went directly from the floor of
the chicken house to the garden. It was dried in-situ so it was ready to
spread when it was dug up, but the digging up was durned near asphyxiating;
from the first pitchfork-full to the last a week later, the entire chicken
house would be full of dust and an almost pure amonia smell. That amonia
odor would gag you and choke you and bring tears to your eyes, but it didn't
matter; Pop wanted that chicken manure moved from A to B and there was only
one way to get it there: Si. T'was me. I HATED that job. So did the
chickens because they would flee the chickenhouse the moment the spade hit
the floor unitl roosting time.
He had great gardens, Pop. Big things all over the place. But cleaning
the chicken house was one reason most of us kids got jobs as soon as we were
14 years old; we left it for the kids behind us.
Hmmmm. Maybe the point wasn't getting the manure out after all. If we had
jobs we weren't a drain on the household economy.
Naw, surely Pop wasn't that smart...
carp