Compost and Crazy-Making February-ness

It’s February, which means that serious gardeners all throughout the northern hemisphere are beginning to freak out.

Okay, there are, like, five of you who are calm, cool, and collected.. but the rest of us are going crazy trying to find our seed packets (which freezer did I put them in...??), scrape together enough starting medium to get our brassicas going (I swear I had one more bag in the old tub in the greenhouse..??), and kicking ourselves for not starting our alliums last month (AGAIN??). Seeding trays are coming out of storage, heat mats are being tested after long months of loneliness in the back of some closet, and some man-person somewhere is being informed that he has to invent and then build a way for his wife plant all of her seeds in perfect rows in her raised beds. Oh yeah, and the raised beds need to be re-done! 

Compost suppliers are getting frantic phone calls over a product they don’t have in stock yet, and homesteader videos on YouTube are starting to see an uptick in views on 5-year-old videos the content creators have re-done 3 times already. 

There’s always something. Something you forgot or something you couldn’t afford back when it was on sale at the end of the season, that you desperately need NOW! 

Okay, maybe it’s just me. 

Or maybe it’s not... 

Every year I tell myself I’m going to this better next year, or, I’ll get this, this and this done over the winter. And every year I fall I either fall sort or just plain forget what it was I was going to do until its time to utilize it. 

Like compost. I have a lot of “pets” that I keep over-winter. You know the kind. Farm animals that normal people process before the snow hits the ground so they don’t have to truck in extra food for them. I, myself, have a pig, a goat, seven chickens, a turkey tom, five ducks, 3 beehives, and barn owl named Cougar. Okay, the barn owl is actually a wild animal, but I leave straw and water out for him in the attic of the workshop, which he seems to appreciate. 

Having so many.. pets... I find myself with lots of manure to work with. I always compost it, but it almost always ends up being a cold compost pile in the winter. In past years that was fine, but this year we’re expanding the annuals garden by 300%. So, I had intended to suck it up and do the work to hot compost it this winter... and totally failed. I have only one 1-cubic-meter pile going in a hot pile and another half a ton sitting in a pile in the back-40 collecting snow. 

In my defense, the backhoe broke down, so I didn’t have the mechanical help to make it easy. But I have 2 strong helpers and a collection of shovels and forks, so really there was no excuse. 

Except that I’m lazy. And it was cold. I spent the winter transplanting trees and digging up old busted water lines. The last thing I wanted to do on my days off was turn ten piles of compost by hand. 

So, now I get to go in search of the bulk compost that doesn’t exist in stores yet. My custom dirt providers won’t have it in until mid-March. so I have to get the allium and early spring beds amended with bagged stuff from the stores. Oh, and I have to suck it up and get shoveling. 

Just as soon as I figure out which freezer I put the garlic chives in.. 

~Candes