I went out to the Great Wall of Compost today, to add the scraps accumulated in the kitchen during the snow time. It has settled a good bit. As the week promises fair weather, I may get back out and turn the whole thing over. I'd love to move it out to where it'd get more rain, but if I do, my neighbor will see it as a concession of ground back to him. See, behind his shed is where he puts crap that's too big to haul away, but that he wants to make disappear.
(Another backyard neighbor has taken up this odious habit. She bags aluminum cans in trash bags, and stacks the bags on her back stoop for the day she will take them to the recycling plant, only two miles away. There, the birds peck the bags open and strew the cans about. Last fall she discovered that if she rebagged them and put them behind her shed, they, too, disappeared. And the birds picked up right where they left off. I offered to rebag them last week. She said she would do it. The disappeared bags, which date back at least 18 months, say otherwise.)
There were three sets of green shoots coming out of the pile- onions I thought past using, and tossed in. Ever the optimist- in the last warm patch, I moved some potato shoots over to last year's potato patch, only to see the snow time kill off the above-ground growth- I moved these over to the old flower bed in the center of the back yard, where the rosemaries live.
As I planted them, a glint of green caught my eye. The grape hyacinths are coming up! Cockeyed, I walked around to the front bed along the entry sidewalk. Whaddya know- the bluebells are up, too, including the ones I relocated some months ago when I dug up all the compacted soil in the bed, turned it, and added six inches of leaf mulch.
The early bulb plants give me hope. I have just about survived another winter, and thus, another year. The days grow a little longer. All that is lacking is living long enough to see checks come in the mail for two book orders from Christmas.
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