Behold, a project with which I am well-pleased. You are seeing me just moments before I put the tarp down on phase one of my great summer projects: my first compost heap. When my chums Sam & Winnie moved to NJ, they took over a backyard out of control. Weeds, branches, leaves, poison ivy, trash, pine needles, rotten cherries and apples piled on everywhere. My two summers of Iowa farm field work were all the pedigree I needed to turn the mighty waste into a land of plenty.

I love summer and I want to be outside every second I can, yet also I wanted to help Sam and Winnie get settled in their new home, which I suspect will be no small task since they want to remodel their casa themselves. The only way for me to satisfy both desires was to take on the assignment of working on the outdoor jobs. First, I cleaned all the gutters, then I cleaned all the years of accumulated crud in the garage. Next, I undertook to clean out the giant trash heap under the house. In the process of doing this, I uncovered many long-neglected gardening tools, and in doing so, a great need to garden was sparked in the depths of my heart.

For me, the desire to garden is merely a part of the desire to attract birds to the yard so I can look at them. There are some awesome trees on the lot, and I have already seen woodpeckers, blue jays, and cardinals. That is a good start, but I want warblers, orioles, tanagers, hummingbirds, finches, and purple martins (if I can get ‘em). Getting to this garden of my dreams, in time for next spring’s migration, necessitated that I plan now. What I decided to do is take the nastiest spot by the side of the garage, and build myself a super-phat compost heap. For one, this will give me a steady supply of worms and slugs with which to attract robins. For two, it will give me world-class fertilizer for all the new plants and flowers going in.

Making this compost heap has been a major undertaking for me in many ways. For one, I started working on it as a way of continuing my physical therapy. When I started with the sickle and shovel, my arm hurt like the dickens. I find however, that the work loosens up and warms up the muscles that hurt, and by the time I am done, I feel great. Emotionally, I got to re-connect with my inner-simpleton, and was able to find that awesome time one gets with their own brain while doing repetitive physical work, especially with the soil. Abe Lincoln I am not, but I will be damned if one can’t learn some basic things about life by taking on projects like this. While far from taming the tangled roots of the virgin prairie, my task also was laden with evidence of the great passing of time. For years, the side, and the underside, of the house has basically been used as a casual trash bin. I found pull-tabs from old beer cans, old broken milk bottles, a lapel button from some old electricians union, and tons of broken pottery and glass. Sifting it out and seeing that there were still worms hard at work seems mundane, but it really felt awesome. The worms and I were both hard at work trying to reclaim that which was treated so shabbily for so long. Time. Time. Time.

Over the course of about 4 or 5 weekends, I was able to clear out the jungle that was in a spot I deemed perfect, so I began the process of building my heap. I found a few sites that tell ya how to do it any number of ways. As it turns out, I lacked a sufficient quantity of cut grass, so it may not be as fast in becoming compost as it might have otherwise, but what I did have to work with is going to be awesome anyway.

The picture above shows about 8 layers packed down into the hole. That is gonna sit for awhile, then we will turn it come fall, and add in leaves and acorns and such. Then come next April, the tarp will come off, and the fertilizing will begin in earnest. It can’t fail! We have already planned our feast for Labor Day 2005. That is when we will eat what we planted, grew, and harvested using our own home-grown fertilizer and compost.

The proliferation of “simple lifestyle” magazines a few years back was as transparent as it was silly. One needed only to look at the advertisers in those magazines to see that these magazines weren’t really about simplicity – it was about the affluent affecting simplicity with vaguely-antiqued $130 garden rakes. Sadly, for me to get even more gooey about feeling the tug of a simple agrarian lifestyle would also be little more than an affectation in kind. While I enjoyed this project immensely, and am really proud I could do it, I actually don’t feel any “man of the soil tug. I hope to return to a rural state someday soon, but I don’t wanna be a farmer or a man of the land. I may want to have a recreational garden, and I will always want to have a place birds find cool, but as happy as I was while this photo was being taken, I was also happy to get home to my tiny dumpy apartment with my gassy indifferent felines. I was exhausted and satisfied having had in one day the best of everything.