Full Of It
A dump truck from a local dairy farm just dropped a load of composted cow manure in my driveway. This will become a soil amendment and mulch for my garden and I love this rich brown stuff!
Because there’s so much of it and it’s used it over a year and too valuable to waste, I need to store it. The government has its Strategic Petroleum Reserve and I have my Strategic Cowshit Reserve – next to my garden, a hole in the ground with a hard-packed clay floor and stone-lined walls. It’s so deep I’ve built steps to descend to its bottom. Over the next few weeks, one wheelbarrow-full at a time, the manure will make its way there.
Anyone who has ever described the lies of the Bush administration or the claims of corporate hucksters or the tall tales told over a few beers as “bullshit” doesn’t know shit about shit. There are few things more honest, more valuable, and more worthy than manure. Whether daintily dropped by cows or brazenly pooped by bulls, this stuff will become my tomatoes and my lettuce, my zucchini and butternut squash, my red onions, scallions, basil, raspberries and blueberries. It will become the food we serve to our honored guests and that which graces our daily meals. It will become the beauty of the garden - the dramatic greens and startling reds and deep black soil of my summers.
At breakfast when my wife walks outside in the early haze of a hot summer day to top her cereal with blueberries or raspberries plucked fresh, the radiance in her face is not just from the morning sun but from the sweet promise of that fruit grown plump and healthy from this recycled cow food. And thus does the stuff of ruminants feed my own bloggy ruminations.