Bunch of hooey!

Guess what Minou is giving me as a birthday gift this year??....

A diamond ring? ....nope
A vacation package to Mexico?....wrong again
A year-long yoga pass?...no, no, and no.

Instead: A load of dirt! A pile of poop! One might even say...a bunch of hooey!

Yup, that's right: 6 cubic yards of the finest compost, delivered to our driveway. It's exactly what I wanted (and asked for). Hooray!

All of my early cool-season crop planting efforts this year have been in vain, despite the rain. There are a number of reasons for this to happen, and I'm not yet a scientific enough gardener to know what's going on. It could just still be too cold. But typically, once I throw those snap pea and chard and lettuce seeds into the ground, they sprout. I've done three replantings this spring, and nothing yet besides a few peas. I have a strong suspicion that our soil nutrients are depleted. It's been several years since we amended it substantially. Although I did plant favas in most beds last fall, and put a leaf cover in the others. Humph!

SO, compost is called for. There's a great free pile of city leaf compost near where we live, but the challenges of getting it here in a small sedan are numerous. Also, even if we borrowed a truck, it's a lot more shovelling: Into the truck, out of the  truck, and then to the garden area.

We have one of these, but it's too small for the plantiung area and not broken down enough.

It's a great source of these though: for feeding to the chickens (I'm sorry, I know it's mean...)

Ahem...back to my dirty stinking birthday present.

The $185 for this treasure is simply not in our tight budget. Although it is sort of a future investment given the food we can grow with a garden, I'm not willing to deplete our emergency savings fund for a garden expense. Also, other home-food-related "investments" have turned out to be not so much so. For example, the boys will not eat eggs from the Ladies. Neither of them like eggs much anyway, but once they realized that the "vent" is where both eggs and poop come out, that was it. Which is why we have 60 eggs in our refrigerator at this writing. However, they do love the Ladies as pets!

Anyway, Minou and I are normally not big gift-givers with each other. However, I let him know that this year, with the changing of a decade and all, I did expect something....and made it explicit what it was.

So I'm waiting with baited breath for a birthday pile of poop to arrive. (Minou also said he would set up the irrigation drip afterwards--yay!!). I can't wait to replant and get cracking on the garden. I'd like to mostly feed myself from it this summer. I also want to plan ahead and have a nice winter garden this year with beets, collards, leeks, and winter squash. Last winter, we were lucky to trade eggs for greens with good friends who live nearby and have a beautiful year-round garden. Maybe we'll even put in a cold frame this year!