Well, it’s September down here in Carlsbad, New Mexico, and it’s down to the low 90’s in the afternoon. A truly pleasant time of year, one in which an old hippie’s thoughts turn to vandalism.
The West Garden did well this year. I planted only six corporate red bell pepper plants, all of which did magnificently, which is unusual, in my experience, for bell pepper plants in this area.
They are, of course, really green bell pepper plants, which will turn more or less red if I leave them on the stalks long enough, long before which all the other developing green bell peppers will pull the stalk down and break it right off.
ALL bell pepper plants are green bell pepper plants (correct me if I’m wrong). They turn yellow, orange, red or purple upon ripening, if you let them ripen. I have no idea how those corporate growers of corporate bell peppers manage to turn out all those huge red ones. Maybe they put the plants in wheelchairs; I don’t know.
But anyway, these all did remarkably well, considering what crappy stock they are. Three feet tall and lots of relatively small green bell peppers for my morning frittata. Yay.
By now you are thinking; "Okay, this is all very well and good, but you lured me in here with that bit about vandalism. I want to hear about the vandalism."
To which I reply; "Patience. We’ll get there."
I’ve been determined this year to actually get off of my lazy old hippie ass early enough to do a good fall planting, which is possible here. I’ve grown spinach and beets with great success through the winter, all the mustard family members (broccoli, arugula, probably everything else) that I’ve tried, do well in our desert soils and relatively moderate winter temperatures. Meanwhile I’ve been muddling around the overgrown garden, feeling a little nervous about the yearly-increasing morning glory naturalization (which some might call an infestation at this point), and admiring the Tarahumara chia (also kind of infesting, but they’re pretty when they flower, and besides I consider growing them a kind of protest against the United States government).
"Where should I plant next?" I ask myself. "There is so much interesting invasive activity going on!"
Focus, Miep. What do we need to do first? Well, first we need to tend to the old compost. Not the new compost, though that needs tending too, boy howdy. But the old compost, because it’s usable with a little work.
The old compost was atop a cement slab just west of the back door of the western house. I didn’t start it there; I start my compost on actual earth. It would be an insult to it, to do otherwise.
But I did have some kind of halfway finished stuff, and I put it on the slab, threw a tarp over it, and kind of forgot about it for a bunch of months.
That was okay. But early this last spring, I started thinking that maybe I had something useful there, and I should let it get wet so it could get all invested with groovy soil biota & sprout out the morning glory seeds, what with the monsoon coming on.
So I took off the tarp. It was a brave decision, but it pretty much worked.
This afternoon, I went out and pulled up all the morning glories and the encroaching Bermuda grass, and pulled out more small sticks (note to self; while it is good for compost to have small sticks in it, it’s really not necessary to have THAT many small sticks in it, not to the point where it takes years and years before half of the compost is not small sticks. Indeed, small sticks can make excellent mulch, handled properly).
I then took my trusty dirt rake and moved it all into a pile, noting that it was a little deeper than I’d expected (very good news!) and also that the concrete slab under it was decaying.
That last came as a surprise. I’d always been aware that there was a concrete slab there. I never liked it. It always seemed wrong. What sort of person would lay a cement slab from their back door to their carport? Especially since the carport is slightly uphill of the backdoor? What were these people thinking?
But I always thought I’d have to take it out with the sledgehammer (the one that curiously came with the property). It never occurred to me, at least consciously, that leaving a decaying pile of organic matter might hasten the job along for me.
Of course, I’ve often been accused of being in denial.
I poked around at it some with the shovel. Some of this concrete was so bad it was turning green. How promising, I thought.
But first, back to the compost. First things first. What to put it in? My usual solution is to use whatever plastic rain buckets and bins I have around that have failed at that task, and indeed I had several (note to self: NEVER buy anything but RubberMaid again, and go back to trashpicking five gallon buckets from the recycling bins; those people have no business recycling such good tools anyway).
This is one of the better moments of the composting process, for me. No more rotting and sprouting and generally making my neighbors nervous for you, compost. Off you go into some nice tidy crappily-manufactured Wal-mart bins, we’ll get to the sifting later. I always sift my compost. It doesn’t get the fine seed out but it gets the pecans out and all of those infernal twigs, plus mango pits and stray beer bottle tops and other miscellaneous garden-inappropriate detritus. There are many tools one can use, but in consistency with the general theme of my life, I made one by wiring a scrap piece of stucco wire to an aluminum window frame, which works quite handily. I set it up on some bricks I snagged out of an alley about ten years back, which in turn are on top of a piece of plastic tarp (and if you don’t know how to get plastic tarp for free, please go practice some before you waste any more of my time asking me questions).
When sifting the compost, it’s helpful to wear gloves, even if you start out doing it with a hand trowel, because invariably you’re going to get impatient and want to use your hands, which is much more fun anyway. In fact, you might even wind up taking off the gloves, but I warn you, this will dry the heck out of your hands.
Where were we? Oh yeah; the vandalism. Now that I had the compost all safely ensconced in ersatz and/or scavenged material (remember, scavenged tends to be better – it’s the American Way) – I got back to the increasingly fascinating concrete.
Years back, I built a French Drain, Miep-style, by the back door, to help with the flooding. This meant digging a largish hole, filling it with lots of pieces of broken concrete (there was a lot of that sort of thing on this property before I started having at it), and covering it with a truly fine piece of 3/4 " plywood that I found while walking my dog. Had to walk back home and get the handtruck to bring that baby back to my house, much to the confusion of my dog and amusement of at least one human. Great score, though!
That helped, but not enough. But what of this concrete ramp, innocently fucking up my watershed here?
Quite a bit of it went easily. Very poorly made concrete, I’ll note; way too much rock. This will all come in very handy the next time I want to set fence posts. (You didn’t really think I was going to throw any of this out, did you?)
The rest yielded to the sledgehammer. If you’ve never broken up concrete with a sledgehammer, you’ve never really lived. Get one that has two ends, one with a blunt end and one with an axe blade-like end. Don’t be afraid to use the axe-blade-like end; it will work very well to center the impact, whereas the blunt end will do well to generally loosen the cohesion of the concrete.
I’ll note that if you want a straight line, you should get your trusty circular saw and a masonry blade, and cut a groove. I personally prefer a raggedy edge trimmed with creeping thyme, as an example, but that’s just me.
The remnants of the bottom stratum of the compost pile (beautiful stuff, looks like worm castings); sifted onto the red clay dirt below.
Remember way back at the beginning of this essay, when I was talking about wondering where to plant next?
I think it’s been long enough. I didn’t tell you about the dog.
Back about five years ago, I was working in the yard and a kid came by, maybe about eight or ten; told me his family used to own these houses. Said that they used to get broken into, and that it would probably happen to me, too. Oh, well thanks, kid.
He also informed me that his dog was buried on this property, and pointed out where. I’d estimate it’s just about where I planted the wild rose that came up from the stock roots of the Lincoln rose that I dug up and gave away (It didn’t make it in its new home, but the leftover roots just won’t stop sending out these little red ramblers).
The wild rose pup is right next to the cement slab. Just at the corner.
I hope I am not unearthing a mausoleum.
OTOH, in this region, it’s statistically likely that the deceased was a Chihuahua.
Shouldn't be a problem. Like bird-bones, from the seventeenth century.
I'll just till high up, and keep adding on the humus.
My house, however, might take to becoming a problem via sinking. The western house. The one on the cement slab.
I hear tents are cheap these days.