Tag Archives: manure

Have You Really Thought About What Helps You To Grow?

tomato-gardenAnother piece in the garden series. No topic in recent days has been more in need of wisdom than this one for me.

Living In New England, you often get the opportunity to smell the fresh manure that has been moved about at a farm or spread on a field. (And truth be told, some farms smell better than others!) Well, no story of a garden can take place without fertilizer and that means even the “spiritual garden” we often speak of. Continue reading Have You Really Thought About What Helps You To Grow?

Just A Garden Variety Kind Of Person

woodchuckAs a child one of my enjoyments was working in a garden. My parents loved to garden and it rubbed off on me. At one point I was working for a handicapped man down the street who taught me how to raise vegetables, strawberries and the like. All summer long he sat in a chair at the edge of the garden and coached me. “Put more manure in the base of that hole!” he would shout across the garden. And during that summer I watched magnificent produce come from that garden. Squash and beans and lettuce and spinach. I was amazed as I recalled the seeds that came out of jars from the past year’s harvest. And the strawberries! I would pick quart upon quart and 25¢ a basket just saying “grow!” so that I would receive more money and more work. It didn’t matter how hot it was. It was just an incredible existence. Each day I would head to his little farm, to feed the chickens, pick up eggs and go pick the first strawberries of the day. Later in the summer I would pick vegetables for hours so that he would sell them. Each fall we would collect the leftovers and he and his wife would gather the seeds for the next year’s plantings. Continue reading Just A Garden Variety Kind Of Person

The Sounds Of Abundance!

"Use me!"
“Use me!”

I walked over to the garden. I stared at the flowers. The vegetables. It was amazing! And the vision disappeared.

So lush, so fruitful, so abundant!

As a child, a neighbor was looking for a young person to help on his small farm-ette. I soon became his right hand man, helping him a couple of times a day for a quarter each time. I would go down in the morning and feed the chickens and geese, gather their eggs and check for critters! Once a week I would shovel chicken manure out into a pile for summer growing. I would have to shoosh the geese out because if they got excited in the small coop it could be dangerous. Continue reading The Sounds Of Abundance!

An Abundance

radishWhen I was young, I bought this old house next to our store. The yard had been a “mill river” running the grist mill in the garage area. The previous owner and friend had witnessed the water rising too high and too fast one rainy weekend and brought his excavator in the next weekend and diverted the water. (Uh…you can’t do that now!!)
Where the river had been, I wanted a garden. Continue reading An Abundance