The Occasional Occurence

This past weekend, I enriched some soil. I know it sounds cool, but really, it was freakin' awesome.

I started with light brown dusty dirt in a "flower bed". It might have even been tainted with nuclear waste. Nothing grows in it. Ants prefer to make their nests in the concrete sidewalk adjacent to it.

So I started in on the dirt. What did I start in on it with? A real-deal pick ax. Oh. Yeah. I didn't let up either. OK, I did let up, a few times in fact. That dirt was hard. Harder than the hands of any of the Cleveland Browns' wide receivers. That hard.

After I was done with the pick ax, I started in with the shovel. I loaded the dirt into a wheel barrow. I pushed the wheel barrow into the woods. I dumped the dirt. I proceeded to iterate over these steps until at least a ton (weight) of the dirt was in a pile in the woods.

If I were a retired guy prone to exaggeration and I was watching me, I'm pretty sure I would have said "That guy must have hauled twenty, maybe thirty tons of dirt! He was speed shiftin'!"

Let's take stock of the situation. In the front yard I have ... less dirt. In the woods I have ... more dirt. Aha, but also in the woods, I have my secret weapon. An even bigger pile of leaves, from last fall. They have been lying in wait, decomposing, for just such a moment as this.

Now I haul wheel barrows full of dirt/decayed leaves to the front. Load after load. Iterations. Piles of dirt/decayed leaves. I spread the dirt/decayed leaves in the "flower bed".

It used to be light brown, almost sand colored. Now it is brown like coffee grounds - or decomposed leaves - and it is enriched.

cw