Reduce, Reuse, and Could I Have Your Fresh Horse Manure, Please?

Sometime after my sister and I went to college, my dad developed a passion for vegetable gardening. Along the way, he discovered composting and it became a daily ritual. On our visits home, he would show us what he was adding to the compost bin that day and proudly display the literal fruits of his labors. One of my favorite memories of my father is seeing him sit outside in old clothes and a straw hat to protect his face from another skin cancer, watching his garden grow.

I’ve always wanted a vegetable garden, but lack of knowledge, poor soil, small children, summer jobs, arthritis, etc., prevented me from attempting more than an occasional paltry tomato plant. They would produce about as much as I invested in their care – not much.

But, this year, I became my father’s child. I stumbled across Earth Boxes, developed by commercial growers and now also used in home and school gardens. The soil surface is raised about a foot off the ground and the boxes are completely self-contained, making it much easier for an arthritic me to plant and care for them. Our warm South Carolina springs allowed me to plant corn, okra, peppers, lettuce, cucumbers, spinach, blackberries, raspberries, and blueberries in mid-April. And tomatoes. My inexperience revealed itself when the tomatoes seedlings arrived; not realizing that they came in four- packs, I ended up with 36 plants, instead of the nine I thought I ordered. Once they were here, I wanted them all – cherry “Sugary” tomatoes, several varieties of heirlooms ( Rainbows, Red Brandywines, and Costoluto Genovese), Whoppers, and Beefy Boys.

And then it hit me – the need to compost, like an alarm from my biological clock screaming, “Do this now before it’s too late.” Here we sit, on two acres of property, most of which requires mulch for maintenance. The idea of free composted mulch was just too much for me to pass up.

I knew that arthritis would make it nearly impossible to turn compost regularly and shovel it up from the ground for spreading. And then I discovered another product developed over 40 years ago, the ComposTumbler, a drum rotated by a geared crank handle standing about three feet off the ground and said to turn 180 gallons of yard and kitchen waste into black gold in about two weeks. No bending, no kneeling, no lifting off the ground. Just fill it, crank it a few times a day, back the yard cart under it and fill ‘er up.

I was surprised to find how quickly our daily egg shells, coffee grinds, and raw fruit and vegetable scraps accumulated in the tumbler and pleased to see that I almost never ran the kitchen garbage disposal. We don’t really have that much yard waste since the drought that’s affected the South for years is in the process of killing our small areas of fescue. But, two acres of wooded property provide a lot of undergrowth and scrub trees to be shredded and composted, so I envisioned clearing our land of nuisance plants and then composting them for mulch to prevent their reappearance. The image of an environmental Eden took shape in my mind.

(Don’t let me mislead you; there was nothing cost-effective about setting all this up. New kink-free hoses, specialty sprinklers, supports for tomatoes and cucumbers, plant foods, and insect sprays added to the possibility and cost of my success. Seedlings are far more expensive than starting a garden from seed. I would have had to produce enough tomatoes to feed the entire city of Greenville to make this year’s efforts financially feasible. If you read my entry ‘One I’d Rather Not Write’, you’ll understand some of the impact of my personal gardening revolution on our financial health. If I can keep up the gardening and composting for at least five more years, I might finally save enough money in food costs to exceed the expense of the equipment.)

Our dear friends down the street have horses, goats, and chickens. They collect the animal droppings in a large pile in their pasture, allowing them to break down over time with no turning or activators to produce usable compost. They have more than they can use regularly, so I asked if I could have an occasional load of fresh manure to add to the tumbler. The manure adds nitrogen to the mix, providing the catalyst that breaks down the other “ingredients”. I can’t begin to explain the pure pleasure of filling our yard cart with the straw and manure taken from their barnyard, sittiing on the lowered back gate of our pickup, clutching the handle of the yard cart and holding on for dear life, as George slowly crept home. I thought of it as aromatherapy for the entire neighborhood. Shoveling that first load of manure into the ComposTumbler only made me want more.

In the two weeks it takes to break the contents down into compost, I had to pick up handfuls of the work in progress and squeeze it to make sure the moisture content was just right. I hate to garden in gloves, but decided this job probably called for a good water- proof pair. A thermometer also had to be inserted deep into the load to insure that the temperature was high enough to kill any bacteria or germinating seeds from waste plant materials. This required me to stick my entire arm in the tumbler, scraping manure and other scraps off the opening onto my shirt and bare skin. I admit that I usually headed straight for the shower after each of these required procedures. But, I was hooked and I began to dream how much better it would be to have two tumblers producing compost on alternating weeks. If only our friends had elephants…

The big day arrived after two weeks of cranking the drum around and around each day. I sent an email to my closest friends and family to announce the unveiling of the garden gold. My husband and I marveled that the smell of manure had given way to a sweet earthy fragrance, despite the obvious lumps of horse apples throughout. My first load produced two garden cartfuls of compost, enough to mulch several square feet four to five inches deep. When I proudly displayed the newly dressed areas of our yard to our friend, he shook his head, looked at the size of the rest of our property and said, “You’re going to need a lot more manure.” I wasn’t discouraged; after all, his animals are healthy.

Despite my impatience, our vegetables started producing in mid-June. Freshly picked cherry tomatoes are literally better than candy. And, coat any type of tomato with a little olive oil and basil, place it on the grill for just a few minutes, and it is mouth-watering. We eat lettuce just a few minutes after picking and our white “Pearl” cucumbers were the best I’ve ever tasted. I stuffed fresh peppers with shrimp and crab and even my husband, who hates the flavor of peppers, ate two. The okra is just beginning to come in and, despite my Southern heritage, I will opt to grill it with olive oil rather than frying it.

It turns out I should leave the corn to the pros. We managed to get two edible ears, but the kernels in no way resembled the perfect rows revealed beneath the shucks of grocery store produce. And my summer bout with pneumonia prevented me from regularly watering our thirsty cucumbers, causing them to wither and suffer an early death.

My planting boxes sit where I can see them from my office windows, lining the driveway and worked in among the landscaping. I’ve envisioned as many as twelve boxes next year, but, financially, that isn’t going to happen. I’ve already identified several vegetable varieties that I want to try next year; however, just like good writing, I will edit that list. I’ll also switch to seeds to bring the expense down to something more manageable. I’m looking for free mulch from our county recycling programs, but the composter will still tumble daily. Manure will still make it’s every-other weekly trip through our neighborhood and home-made compost will gradually spread throughout our yard.

One of my new daily principles is to live intentionally, tempered with common sense. This is where I want to be and this is what I want to do. A few weeks ago, I found myself sitting on the garden bench that George made for my birthday, wearing old clothes and a straw hat to protect my face from another skin cancer, dogs at my feet, watching my garden grow.

I am my father’s child and he would be proud.

Our Version of Reduce, Reuse, and Recyle

When we bought our dream home, it was an early 60s ranch. It was also an abandoned foreclosure with broken windows, mold, water damage, and critters of every description already in residence. On our first trip through the house, we laughed and said, “We aren’t tackling all this. Not us.”

Two weeks later, we found ourselves back inside with Darryl Cowan, a contractor friend, whose specialty just happened to be rehabbing old homes. It was a dream home in our eyes from then on and, unlike our family members and friends, we never envisioned it again in less than its finished state. Our architect Randy McClain, another old friend, paid close attention to our anticipated needs for the coming years and assured that our new digs would accommodate our huge family antiques with grace and comfort.

We decided to use the latest technologies that we possibly could in hopes of creating a home that lived more efficiently for the environment and more cost effectively for us. Our efforts even included landscaping with plants native to our area, reducing the need for maintenance and water. This house costs a fraction of what our last house cost to operate, despite its 4200 square feet. And, thanks to the latest energy efficient appliances, we are using far less in power and water.

Our decision to replace carpeting with hardwood floors triggered a storm of exploration into bamboo, red oak, and other woods new to us. Then a friend sent us to see re-milled heart pine that had been reclaimed from the hundred year old mill where her father worked. It was gorgeous, with rich red tones and a perfectly finished surface. We could purchase it in huge rough beams and have it re-milled to suit our needs for flooring. But, the cost of refinishing it and then transporting it to our site made it impossible to consider.

We visited a salvage yard that Darryl purchased materials from on several occasions and, there, in open sheds, were hundreds of feet of reclaimed heart pine. The dealer Joe Stevens told us that he was preparing to remove flooring from an old house about to be demolished. He invited us to take a look at it and, when we arrived, George and I were stunned to find that the house was across the street from a school where we both recently worked. The floors were blackened with grime and stained with every nasty thing imaginable. Because it was already cut in planks, we would be able to move it by pickup truck and sand the old surface off after the floor was laid. Somehow, it felt right.

We also became interested in the thousands of salvaged doors at the yard. After sorting through them all over and over again, we selected five-panel doors that reminded me of visits to my great aunt’s home in my childhood. I was determined to have solid doors, none of that hollow core stuff. The trouble was that the new doors I wanted were about $300 each. We chose salvaged five-panel doors for all our closets and more unique antique doors for our bedrooms and baths. We paid an average of $10 per door, excluding three that were solid mahogany and oak. An old banister from a church called out to us, as well as three louvered shutters from the exterior of an old Victorian mansion that had been taken down years before.

Every floor refinisher who came to look at the heart pine after it had been laid shook his head and said, “I’ll never be able to clean it up or level it to your satisfaction.” Three of them came, worked a day, and never showed up again to work or to be paid. With each of about five sandings, the red depths of the wood were revealed more and more fully. George and I weren’t the least bit bothered by the remaining worm holes, the chips, the varying widths and thicknesses, and the history that showed in an hundred ways.

The banister took three days to strip of the dirt built up over decades. The shutters couldn’t be fully stripped of their lead paint, so we sealed them with glaze to keep the chips from falling in our mouths as we slept, and hung them as a headboard for our new king-size bed. We decided to leave the bedroom and bathroom doors almost exactly as we found them - some completely unstained and some in their original finishes. If we could identify the origin of the door, we labeled it to reflect its past. Our powder room door once hung on the Monsignor’s office of the oldest Catholic Church in town. It now proudly bears the word “Monsignor” in gold and our bathroom door says “Faculty Lounge” on its upper half of frosted glass. Every single door inside the house had to be hand-framed, raising our cost of $10 per door steeply. No two doors in the house are the same size.

In pulling off the original small back porch to replace it with a screened porch running the entire back length of the house, Darryl discovered redwood decking buring under ancient outdoor carpeting and a layer of well-worn plywood. He pulled the redwood off for George, who used it to build all the furniture we now use on the porch.

In the end, we felt the house had been restored to its real age, timeless, of an unidentifiable point in history. Every craftsman who has walked in the door since exclaims, “You kept the original floors and doors!” In fact, we can count the original features of the house on one hand.

Darryl still isn’t quite satisfied. He says that one day he will bring a master finisher back in to sand three additional times and re-poly all the heart pine. And the floor would probably be as pristine as the exquisite one we saw made from re-milled, reclaimed heart pine from the cotton mill. But, it will never happen as long as we own the house. We can tell that children played on these floors, dogs chased cats, fires got out of control, family members were born and died, and life continued through generations. It’s very comforting to see ourselves in that cycle, even if we are a new family in its history. Our family furnishings are at home, as well, and look as if they have been in place since they were handcrafted up to 250 years ago.

Three miles from our house, Southern Living magazine recently completed a million-dollar green home on the campus of Furman University. It’s beautiful and inspiring; if you get a chance to see it, it is well worth the cost of admission. There are a few things I wish we had included in our home, but our house could still be retrofitted to add many of them as we can afford.

But, somehow, the Southern Living home doesn’t feel as good to me as knowing that we brought a great house back to life and that we returned so many idle materials to daily use in both form and function. We built a home, not a house, and the quality of our lives has improved immeasurably as a result. If you have the opportunity, you should see it, too, and it won’t cost you a dime. We’ll be waiting on the porch with iced tea.