Step 2: Crap as a Precious Commodity

In order to be as resourceful as possible with this project, naturally, we would scavenge the "free" lists on Craigslist. Evelyn and I were like bloodhounds with our noses to the trail; everyday we would check the free and garden and home posts online to see if someone was giving away anything that we needed.

I came upon a local Rabbitry offering "Rabbit Fertilizer," a.k.a. rabbit turds mixed with straw and dried leaves, for $5 for a 13 gallon trash bag full, which we thought was a great deal for fertilizer. We do have a slight bunny problem -- basically, we have our own personal wild-rabbittry in the brush that borders our yard -- so I, personally, did not want to risk using poop that might attract them to our produce. I imagined we would fertilize the garden beds with rabbit fertilizer and wake up the next morning with four hundred rabbits in the backyard circled around the garden, as if they were having a sort of conference about taking over our veggies later.

Luckily Evelyn discovered a farm that was giving away horse manure fertilizer for free, so she jumped on the opportunity the next day and brought home a whole truck bed full... which resolves my worry of the rabbit conference, but now I am imagining a herd of wild horses bulldozing Nashville to hang out in our back lawn with all the manure. I am not really for sure why I think all animals might feel welcomed by a pile of their own species' manure -- that's really weird of me.

We transported the horse crap into one of the straw bale beds (a whole truck bed full was only enough for one of the raised beds) and covered it with dry leaves as a mulch. The dried leaves should decompose into the manure a bit before we transplant the seeds at the beginning of April.

While making multiple trips between the truck and garden beds with a barrel full of horse waste, I was dreaming about how wonderfully healthy this fertilizer might make our produce later this summer. Honestly, its amazing how precious this crap is to our whole project. It was very sobering, once the pile had been unloaded, to be scraping up the last bits of horse manure and picking up clumps off the ground (we were all wearing gloves by the way) like it was a treasure, all in order to help our garden grow.

Amidst the smell, I was reminded of people in ancient times or in less developed parts of the world working and utilizing every resource they had, and praying for provision and substance -- that their efforts would not all be in vain. We are so oblivious at the work and muscle that goes into our food while traveling down lighted grocery store isles, grabbing things off the shelf and rushing to the checkout. After we finished unloading all the turds, I found that I had livestock poop on my overalls and had worked up quite a good sweat.

A shower was much needed, but Evelyn was motivated. Next, we were going to open the compost bin and see what had happened to all our banana peels, salad leftovers, old twigs, and stale bread the last few months. Boy was she excited.