Poop Deck Maintenance

As happens with many projects, you get one thing nicely refreshed and suddenly there are satellite projects that need to be addressed.  Yesterday it was Poop Deck Maintenance.  This is the area where I process my compost.  The Compost pile is almost always up against the Railroad Ties and this has rotted them out.  This... and the darn Viburnum roots.

The Poop Deck was constructed back in 2012 and it has held up very well.  In the corner, both second level ties were disintegrating, but the base ties below, and the cap ties were still OK.  We did have a couple of spare RR ties stored away for projects like this, and we had two ties that would work.
First you have to tear everything apart, and I was actually cleaning the house, so I did not arrive on scene until it was time to put things back together.  We propped the new ties above their designated spots, and then using the chainsaw, cut them to fit.

Two new corner ties.

And then all put back together.  It looks like nothing happened, but in reality it was eight hours of hot sweaty work with a lot of stinky creosote and some serious laundry generation.  Still to be done: drilling holes for new rerod and driving rods to pin the wall together.

Compost and the Chipper Shredder

Up until now, our compost material has been chiefly horse-manure.  We compost our kitchen scraps and selection of plant trimmings throughout the year and when the compost tube is full we incorporate it into the manure pile.  But in the fall when we cut back all of the vegetation, we end up wasting a lot of compost opportunity.  We just pile it at the edge of the woods and let it return to nature.  With the effort involved with sourcing, moving and composting horse manure, it makes much more sense to make use of all this green yard waste instead.

Last year while Tim was watching me chop down and manage my buckwheat cover crop, he decided we needed some sort of shredder to deal with the long, woody stems that end up in a tangle.  This year when I gathered up my cornstalks, he decided it was a necessity.  How could we possibly waste all of those cornstalks?

We had researched on-line several different brands and sources for a chipper shredder.  Since we live in a retail dead-zone, there aren't too many ANY places you can just walk in and comparison shop for a chipper.  We could mail order one.  Or Tractor Supply could order one in. We wouldn't see what we were buying until we unpacked it.

It just so happened, that the weekend we were planning to go to the new farm supply store opening in town to see their single offering, a DR Chipper Shredder, we stumbled upon a (never) used vintage model sitting in a garage at an estate sale.  And when I say never used I mean there had never been gas in the tank.  The man had purchased it in 1994 and just stored it in his garage. And now we know why - because it is a fearsome beast not for the faint of heart.  But I digress.  It was now part of his estate, and no one knew anything about it other than that they had the receipt from 1994.    A deal was struck for a bargain price and the chipper came home with us.  What Luck!

It is a Troy-bilt Tomahawk with a 5 hp Tecumseh motor.  Just a starter model.  Troy-bilt also had 8 hp Briggs-Stratton motors and those Tomahawks are 2 inches wider.  Remember back in the 90s when we started to complain that they didn't make things like they used to?  It hadn't gotten that bad yet.  I am now complaining that they no longer make things like they did in the 90s.  It makes the $800 DR model at the farm supply store look like a child's toy from Dinkytown.

The comparable DR Model available locally for $799

This older Troy-bilt is big, beefy, weighs about three hundred pounds and is a fearsome beast.  The motor tried to start up on the second pull.  After sitting for twenty-five years.  Another couple of tries and it roared to life.  When we tried to engage the lever that runs the flails, the motor smoked the belt and stopped dead in its tracks.  The sticker says to "engage the lever slowly" and they mean SSSLLLOOWWWLLLYYY.  You have to put just enough friction on the belt to get the flails spinning, and gradually increase the speed until the motor and shredder RPMs are compatible, and then and only then can you lock the lever all the way.  I'll be that poor guy tried to engage the flails, scared the pants off himself with all the squealing and the smoking, and decided to never try again. And I don't blame him

Once it is running it will pulverize anything you let it get ahold of.  Its like a slightly unhinged horse or cow (or dog) that you don't really trust but treat with respect, and get along with just fine, until one day it turns on you, pins you up against the barn wall, and tries to kill you. The first time we stuck a cornstalk into the shredder hopper, it disappeared instantaneously.  Quicker than the eye.  There one instant and gone the next.  Holy Shit!

The screen it came with on the left, and the
 eBay grill, modified to fit this model, on the right.

But there is a problem with the cornstalks.  They are full of corn syrup and very sticky, even after being cut and dried for a couple of weeks.  The Tomahawk came with a discharge screen with  3/4" holes.  The cornstalks gummed up pret. ty. quick.  We found that we had to stop the chipper every five minutes and clean the screen.  Which isn't really difficult.  You just pull three pins and it slides right out.  After you practice a few dozen times, you could do it with your eyes closed.  You just have to stop the thing and then get it started again.

After our cornstalk episode we went indoors and Googled the owner's manual (the stickers give adequate instructions to start and run the machine) and the manual says for wet materials to just remove the screen.  Removing the screen allows the shredder to shoot vegetation right through without really chopping it that much.  The screen holds the material back so the flails can chop it finer.  You can get screens with larger holes, and a quick search of eBay found a bar grill instead of a screen.

We've decided that we need to process our compost in smaller batches so we can easily sort through the types of material we want to shred and set the machine up for that.  There are some things that shred beautifully.  Small leafy branches, for instance, contain the right ratio of dry wood to wet leafy greens.  It is wise to keep a few dry sticks around to clean the shredder.

It loves marigolds because of their woody stems.  It's really fun to give it a marigold plant and have it come out in a shower of green, yellow and orange confetti.  Bush bean plants are also a big hit.  Impatiens shred easily but have a high juice content and turn into mush that needs to be cleared from the shoot.  Long stemmy grasses and day lily leaves need to be held back so they don't just shoot through unscathed.  If you have these things in separate piles, you can give the machine the perfect combination to keep things running smoothly.  We kept a few three inch tree limbs for last to clean the flails.

The Before Pile

It takes several days (five) to cut down all of our perennials and annuals.  As I said before we have usually just piled the bulk of the waste at the edge of the woods and let it return to nature.  We ended up with a sprawling pile of vegetation to deal with.  There is everything from woody day lily stems to juicy impatients.  This would all compost down eventually, but if you run it through the chipper you not only reduce the volume by at least two thirds (advertised as 10:1, but maybe and maybe not), you also mix the wet with the dry.

The After Pile

Two and a half hours later we had reduced the pile to about a fifth of the volume.  It was a sizable job but gratifying and sort of fun.  Now I will have to turn the pile now and then so it composts down to something useful.  Next time we trim shrubs and tree limbs we won't have to pile them out back for a brush fire.  We can just wheel out the chipper and turn them into mulch.

Shredded cornstalks

Some of the material I used right away as mulch.  The cornstalks went straight back into the beds they came from.  I'll leave this until spring and then rake it into the soil.  Right now the consistency is much like grass clippings, forming a thick mat over the soil to block weeds until spring and feed the earth worms.

The buckwheat was both stems that were cut a month or more ago and left to dry mixed with green cut that day.   A total of four beds of growth went to the poorest bed which needs the most help. The combination of wet and dry made a nice mulch.

Now the remaining pile of horse manure residing on the Poop-deck will be re-located to somewhere that we can still get to it.  Having acres and acres comes in handy sometimes.  We will probably mix it into one of our older compost/topsoil piles created from sod edgings, green waste and other soil incidents. We use that material for repairing the lawn or starting new landscape beds.  Then we will develop a system for shredding and composting all of our green waste in a tidy and organized fashion.  The gardening system continues to evolve.

6 Months of Compost

This large piece of corrugated drain pipe was left over from an earlier project where we filled in the open ditch that ran along our road frontage.  We drilled air holes in it and we use it to cook our kitchen compost before we turn it into the larger compost pile.

This is what six months of compost looks like.  There is a layer of autumn leaves about midway.  If you were to screen the lower half it would be ready to use.  What we do is dump it out and cover it with finished compost so the partially composted material ends up in the center of the pile to continue to break down.

The finished compost pile can be seen in the background.

But this time we are moving the whole pile off of the poop deck and into the edge of the woods so we can do some poop deck maintenance.

These large rectangular concrete pavers were salvaged from an old patio.  They were sitting in a pile down in the yard of a local landscaper and we have used them in several places around the property.

Tree roots have encroached from the woods and caused several of the pavers to heave.  

We removed them pulled out the larger roots and used sand to re-level the area

After replacing the pavers we brushed play-sand into the seams and the deck is as good as new.

The Waiting Game and Quirky Mass Marketing

As I wait the allotted 10-14 days for the most adventurous of my eggplant seeds to sprout, I reflect on the fact that gardening is often an exercise in watering dirt.  Each day I go to my flat of dirt filled pots, inspect them carefully, and add water.  Tim asks if everything is alright with my plants?  What plants?  Everything is just fine with my dirt...  In the larger scheme of things, gardening is a lot more about dirt than it is about plants.  And dirt is a lot more about compost...

The pride of any successful garden is a good compost pile

The one thing that always consoles me when I have a gardening failure is that if I am not growing food, then at least I am growing future compost.

Our green waste is composted in a large black drain pipe prior to being integrated into the larger pile.

 Another thing that consoles me as a horse owner... if I am not riding, at least I'm maintaining a source of horse manure.  A well tended manure pile is an excellent source of mass quantities of compost.  No matter what farm animal it comes from, chicken, goat, horse, or cow, and no matter what sort of bedding is mixed in, the important part is that the farmer turns and tends the manure pile.  This breaks everything down evenly so that when it is ready to be loaded up for the garden, it is barely distinguishable from potting soil.

One aspect of gardening that Tim is always involved in is the fetching of compost.  We load it into a tarped trailer, haul it home and shovel it into a pile where we continue to turn and "fluff" it into "black gold".  This is the time when it is necessary to have some large equipment both at the loading end and the unloading end.

Once I get it home, I deal with it in smaller quantities, sifting the larger uncomposted parts out and adding them back into the pile.  If you truly think that you have nothing left to do in the garden on any given day, go out and get some well sifted compost to side dress your plants.

There are few things prettier than a bed of healthy plants wearing a fresh layer of compost.

But even being a no nonsense dirt farmer who buys her beans in bulk and takes great pride in her very large manure pile, I am always intrigued by the 21st Century mass marketing which makes gardening look so easy and colorful.  The goal of a good marketing plan is not merely to sell to a large portion of the existing market, you must also sucker in new buyers who have never gardened before.

Click here for the YouTube demonstration of Gro-ables Gardening.

This is like Lunchables or Pudding Snack Packs for gardening.  Who needs tractors or trowels?  Or cow poop? Just buy a kit at the store, stick it in your cart, and cart it home to your patio.

It almost appears as if no hard work or dirt are involved!

Everything comes with a bar code and instructions!

I have to admit it's a clever idea and rather appealing.  And actually, that might not be a bad way to start a single zucchini plant which will take over the garden and produce dozens of pounds of food.  But at the same time, that is the long way to go about planting a row of beans or peas.  Can you even imagine?

In another two weeks it will be Good Friday and I will be chomping at the bit to get my garden peas in the ground.  With any luck the snow will have melted by then.

The Building of the Poop Deck

Tim has had this project going for awhile.  Anyone who had done hardscaping knows that a lot of work goes in behind the scenes before the finish work gets done.  There were trees to cut, stumps to pull, gravel to add and compact....  then you must wait and let the earth settle.  The object here, is to get our compost area up closer to the garden.  We have stored the manure, and the compost pile back in the edge of the woods out of sight.  Which means, during canning/freezing season, I am generally emptying my scraps at night, in the dark, in the woods, beyond the reach of all outdoor lights... out there, down the lane and around the bend.

Having the compost stored right outside the garden, with no puddles to cross, in the edge of the mercury lights, is a great luxury.  Plus, when we bring in loads of manure, it will be easy to just back in and dump.  We don't compost on a small scale.  My horse is boarded at my mother's farm, and my step father cleans the barn and maintains the manure pile.  He composts it through the year and spreads it on the pastures at the optimum time.  He always saves the best poop for me :) 

When the pile gets home, I just dig a hole in the side somewhere, and throw our fresh scraps into it.  We cover the new material with old material, and periodically turn the pile.

Tim constructed the retaining walls with used railroad ties which were drilled and secured with steel rods on each side of any seam.  They don't need to be high as we have plenty of area and won't have to pile up against them.   He back filled with dirt to reinforce the walls and I will transplant some ground cover back there.

Over the crushed bank run, which was compacted with the two-ton-rock-crusher, Tim dumped sand and he and I screeted it off level with a little pitch towards the back so rain won't wash any debris from the pile into the drive.

Tim's work is always meticulous even when building a patio to dump shit on.  But the more time you spend in the building of something, the less time you will spend in the repair and maintenance.

Neighbor Mike was recruited to help heft the heavy 2'x3' concrete pavers which were salvaged from a local landscaper.

This part went fast.  Many hands make light work.

Shelly and I looked for high spots and jumped up and down on them to seat the pavers into the sand.  The spacing had to be adjusted, so everyone stood on the pavers that shouldn't move while Tim levered each row into the proper spot. 

EveryBody's Doo-O-in' a Brand New Dance Now... Come On Baby, Do the Locomotion!

About this time we decided that the "Poop Deck" was much too nice for a compost pad and that it would make a much better patio.  It affords a lovely view of the garden, and is shaded from the afternoon sun.  We grabbed a couple of the fire pit chairs and tried it out.

To finish it off, I swept sand into all the joints.  Tim laid the last course of pavers and finished the front edge with a row of railroad ties to lock everything in.  He watered everything in well, and after a few more rains, it will have settled permanently.  Then I will go fetch some more horse manure.  In the mean time, I agree... this would make a much nicer patio than a poop deck.  But, if you're going to have a pile of poop, it may as well be properly staged.