Relative Something

I laughed at myself yesterday, thinking about my unorthodox methods. When I lived in the suburbs, I would collect fallen leaves and spread them all around our lot as ground cover, while all my neighbors were collecting theirs and bagging them to be thrown away. Now I am using composting manure to fill low spots, without waiting for it to become dirt.

One area I am working on is just outside the back door of the barn. Last year when we were creating the paddocks, we had water piped from the barn to a Ritchie waterer for the horses. Excavators dug a very deep trench to get below the frost line, and it exited the barn by that door. I think we are going to be needing to add fill over that trench for a few years as the dirt they filled it with continues to settle.

This spring, after the snow melted away, the ground had dropped down so much that the first step out of the back door had become a real doozy. I have slowly been filling that trench with the dirt and manure that was raked into piles in the paddock at the end of winter. I got the idea to use that for fill from the fact that the piles ended up being more dirt than manure. Still, I am putting poop on the yard as fill. How unsanitary is that?

The last few rain events interrupted the composting process on my main pile, by getting everything too wet. I’m using the oldest portion at the end of the pile anyway. It can dry out where I spread it to fill the depression caused by the trench.

You might be able to discern how I have segmented the pile to create sections with differing stages of composting. I think it would work, if I had a roof over it to control the moisture.

Not gonna happen. Not for a while, anyway. I’ve still got a woodshed to rebuild before I embark on any other roof constructing projects.

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