Dirty

Despite our devotion to ferrying all kitchen scraps out the path and over the bridge to the compost heap, our composting efforts have not been fruitful. That is, unless you measure success by the number of animals they've attracted to our house.

Disco and TK were drawn in by our leftover mac n' cheese.

And Roger the bear seems to be bedding down by the heap, which is why we've shut it down.

The other non-verbal members of our community - the peas and corn and zucchini - express disappointment over our dry, flaky, compost through their pallor.  If plants had feet, ours would hightail it over to darker, richer, more fertile dirt pastures. Gardening success, as Stella and my permaculture teacher taught us, is all about the dirt.

And so, in anticipation of a long, cold, nutrient-rich sleep for our garden beds, I've been on the hunt for some black gold, otherwise known as manure, at least in the gardening community.

My 'Women of the Dirt' listserv offers all kinds of canning, gardening, animal husbandry advice and connections, and, in this case, cautionary tales. It turns out that many a garden has been ruined by efforts to fertilize using horse manure from horses that have been eating herbicide-treated hay. The accumulation of the herbicides in the manure stops plants from growing, sometimes effectively killing a garden for years.

While a new study suggests that eating organic is no healthier than eating conventionally-grown produce, the same does not seem to apply for your manure.