A Sort of Spring Cleaning

It felt good today to get back into my garden for the first time this season. The weather was perfect for it: 65 and sunny with a light breeze. With Treat's help, I got all the beds cleared and about half or the other space. It'll take several hours to get the whole job done, but today was a good start. 

Another thing we did was turn the compost. I have three bins that I have been filling, one since I got the garden in 2009, another since about 2018, and a third since last summer. All the weeds and unusable vegetables go in there, plus the plants when I clean out at the end of each season. The newer bins were easy to turn-- we simply removed the front slats and pitch-forked the contents out. From them, we got about 5 5-gallon buckets of nice, dry compost to add to the beds we had cleared. Then we layered the bigger, unbroken stalks and stems with the weeds we had pulled today, and some of the dry compost, too. 

Afterwards we put some contractor bags over the top to heat it up and some cobble stones from the garden to hold them down. I have great faith that it will turn into the best compost ever, a belief I repeated to Treat more than a few times. He is very tolerant of his auntie, though, and listened without complaint. 

The third bin was there when we were first assigned to our plot. A repurposed trash bin that sat wheel-less in one of the overgrown corners of the garden, it, along with the huge manhole that usurps a big space in the middle, the rat bait trap on the fence line, and the weeds that had overrun the whole plot did not daunt me when first I took stewardship, although they probably should have. And indeed, the bait trap was removed right away, the manhole is a perfect place to set a container garden, and the weeds, well, every year they reign a little less supreme. But that compost bin? I did manhandle to a spot against the fence a couple years ago, but emptying it or turning it? I've never had it in me to start that task. 

Until today. Treat and I brought it over to the other bins and dumped it out. For 13 years of clippings and such, its contents were unimpressive, but when we got to the bottom we found some electronic sprinkler thing, a bone, and all manner of trash that had been left by the previous gardeners. The experience was a cross between an archaeological experience and just plain gross. But we tossed the garbage, and incorporated the other contents into the greatest compost ever, and then dragged that bin back to its corner where it can continue to do its job for many more years to come.