The Manure Pile

Building the Soil - or in other words...
The Huge Pile of Horse Crap in our Front Yard

We really are very fortunate that we live in a neighborhood where not one person has complained about the fact that we have about 3 tons of horse poop on our front lawn!

This came about because we found a farmer on Craig's List who owns 20 or so horses and wanted to get rid of some manure. He sold it for $75 a truckload - and I do mean a TRUCK load. A huge truck, not a pick-up truck. He was willing to deliver it, which we were ecstatic about because we had filled up our own pick-up with manure several times and that job - pardon my slang - really totally sucked! The farmer who delivered the manure is an older man and he didn't make it to our house for a long time, so when he finally called to say he was ready to come with his truck load of poop we were ready. He arrived with this huge truck and we realized that if he drove the truck to the back of our lawn it would probably sink into the soil and make big ruts - and he might actually get stuck. Sooooo...we decided to have him dump the manure in the front yard. We didn't really want to think about what that was going to look like - we were just excited to get started gardening.

After he dumped the first load he offered to bring ANOTHER load, and we thought we might as well strike while the iron was hot. He was such a sweet guy, and he kept telling us that he didn't feel very well and might not live much longer. That did it for us and we ended up with 3 loads of manure that day. He ended up only charging us $50 for the whole pile!! I imagine he had a lot of manure he wanted to get off his hands that day that was maybe clogging up his barn and we were willing takers. I suppose you might wonder about us a little - taking 3 tons of sh_t and paying $50 for it. But I'll tell you that the manure is black gold when you want to start a good organic garden. One friend has actually told us that she has "manure envy" because we have so much manure now!!

It helps to know that we can start another garden bed whenever we want to because we have so much good rich composted manure. We are wealthy in horse crap and are the envy of the neighborhood! Who would think!

It is interesting what one finds valuable in life, and to take note of how that can change...


Piling manure on a new bed