Actual Poop

by Nathan Rutz

I finally have some actual poop for this blog!!

But first a few other things:

1. Aw come on Food Forest Farm

2. Hot, warm, and unusable

3. Old crap

 

Aw come one Food Forest Farm

I ordered some interesting plants from Food Forest Farm, of Paradise Lot fame. Jostaberry, sunchoke, American groundnut, hog peanut, Turkish Rocket, Russian Comfrey, and good king Henry. Unfortunately they seem to pack things poorly, everything was covered in tape.  The plants look a little spindly and weak, in comparison to the gloriously rooted plants from Fedco. Also, the blasted sunchoke plant they sent me is just a single sunchoke. I paid $8.95 for something that would have cost 25 cents at my local Asian grocery.

Hot, warm, and unusable

I was preparing for the arrival of my Food Forest Farm plants and wanting to start more seeds outside (yeah yeah it’s really late shut up) and was planning on using my older compost pile mostly made of coffee to amend my lousy purchased soil.

I stopped adding to the older pile in February, but it didn’t do much of anything until the world began to thaw in mid-March. It was really hot and seems to be less hot now, but as I dug in it was still pretty warm. I had some misgivings about using it, but had decided to anyway. In one last bout of doubt, I called Andrew Needham formerly of Needham Gardens in Cleveland.  He told me to definitely not use half finished compost because it can inhibit plant growth and get some old horse manure for free from some Craigslist horse person.

I mostly followed his instructions. Since I’d already partially dug out the old compost pile I spread a little bit on my annuals hugul bed and put two seedlings and several seeds just to see what’ll happen.

Anyhow, I finally decided to stick my brewing thermometer in the compost piles, the newer one I continue to add to is quite hot at 138F:

 

The older one is indeed cooler, but definitely still active at 126F:

Old Crap

Turns out there are some nice folks with horses that give away 1 year+ manure away for free just down in Valley View, only about 25 minutes from me. Valley View is really interesting – it’s a suburb that feels really rural but is closer to downtown than the suburban hells of Westlake and Avon.

The turds looked pretty darn decroted, so I went for it.

 

I filled 9 bags, which was almost enough.

This horse came to say goodbye as I rolled out