Monkey Battles, Garlic Thieves & The Spoils Of War..

December 2013

 
During a recent conversation with my good friend Ragnar about my garden back in Banaras, it occurred to me that I had never posted the final update from the last few months of work in the Resurrection Garden. Somewhere in amongst our relocating back to Australia for 6 months this post quite understandably just got lost in amongst the hubbub of life. So without further a do, I'd like to offer you an insight into some of my monkey troubles, garlic thieves and the spoils of war!   

December 2013

In late December I had broken the back of the manual labor and was mostly in maintenance mode with the Garden so most visits were just about some spot weeding, enjoying a chai on my favourite garden seat and the daily task of removing the neighbour's rubbish (and semi-regular bags off poo). I had already planted out all the beds with the seedlings I'd been growing in my house in the previous months and things were coming along nicely but as things always go in Banaras, an increase in production results in an increase in interest, and not the positive kind.

For a number of months we'd been frequently commenting how great the absence of Bundar (monkeys) had been and how well our gardens were able to get established in their absence. But wherever they had been they had obviously decided it was enough and back to our homes they came, and brought with them plenty of reinforcements. Almost daily I'd be racing up the to gardens, slingshot and warhammer in hand (ok.. so maybe it was just a large stick) to chase them away but ultimately it was a war of attrition and both sides were amply supplied. Oodbilav is a crack shot with our hunting slingshots and would regularly send them scurrying back to higher grounds with their tails between their legs (though usually after they had filled their belly's from our gardens). And even our neurotic landlord went and bought a high powered air riffle and would regularly patrol the property with his young sons taking shots at them. One day he even confessed to trying to shoot one in it's bottom but missed and hit it in the heart! He said that it died soon after and so he wrapped it in a mala made of marigolds and that night, under the cover of darkness, launched it off his roof top and sent it splashing down into the Ganga (Ganges River) 3 stories below.. Ooh how the madness never let up!

February 2014

As it got later into December and the cold really set in, you could see the difference in growth as things really began to slow down in the Garden. Crops that weren't already well established either died off or essentially their growth ground to a halt and as this dramatically effects the flavour of most crops, some of them were forcibly relocated to their new home in the compost pile. To fill in the spaces of those crops that weren't performing well I chanced upon a small gardening store in town that had a new pile of seedling strewn across their counter and I managed to pick up a couple of different types of veggies that went straight into the ground. They didn't perform quite as well as I'd hoped but when you're handed a pile of seedlings that have their roots completely exposed and are wrapped in nothing but strips of wet newspaper, well, you only have moderate expectation (and for AU$0.43 I didn't loose much sleep over it).

The Organic Hairy Canadian

Considering that the River Ashram is a Jesus Ashram, it probably comes as no surprise that Christmas day ends up being one of our busiest days of the year. Each year we hold a huge celebration on Christmas day and invite travelers and friends to join us in all our festivities. In the past 3 years we've had anywhere between 80 and 120 people rock along (last year we had a turn out of people from 26 different countries) and we always put on an incredible feast. Fresh salad is a rare commodity around Varanasi - and a fresh Organic Salad, well, that's an even rarer find - so I'd been holding off harvesting my salad greens for a while as I wanted to share them as part of the Christmas celebrations. And as you can see in the above pic, between Shookdedy Ba-Boooom's garden and mine, come Christmas morning we had a fantastic time in the Gardens harvesting an amazing collection including 8 different types of fresh, crisp, gorgeous organic lettuce which was devoured in no time.

January 2014

 
In January, the cold in Varanasi was at its peak and so as per our tradition we skipped town and heading for the warmer climates of north Thailand to have a couple of weeks holiday, be a part of a conference and catch up with some truly sweet friends who run a community similar to ours in the northern town of Pai. Knowing that I wouldn't be around I used up a great deal of the 80kgs of straw that I had bought months earlier and went to town heavily mulching everything.

Mulch is one of those wondrous things! It's brilliant for water conservation as it keeps the sun from blazing down on the bare earth and drying out your top soil, thus keeping the soil moist and reduces your need for watering by around 60%. It helps keep your soil temperature constant which reduces shock and stress on your plants (particularly helpful for me during these cold months). It helps keep the weeds down and prevents a lot of the weed's seeds from germinating (which is a massive ongoing fight I'm having in the Resurrection Garden) and less weeds means less competition for the nutrients and water that you want going to your dedicated food crops and not away from them. And if you're using an organic mulch such as Straw, Pea Straw, Cane, Bean, Lucerne, etc. as they break down they release organic matter back into the soil which improves drainage and soil structure as well as encouraging earthworms and microbial activity. So if you're new to Gardening then let it be known; Mulch is your friend!

 

December 2013

 
I've tried on a couple of occasions to explain why I put straw onto my garden to my neighbours and Mali ('groundskeeper') but with little success. My Hindis not great so obviously that's a pretty big hurdle, but in Banaras there is really only 2 options when it comes to most things; the way it's always been done and the wrong way - and putting what cow's eat for lunch on top of your garden is quite simply not the way things are done! Shookdedy Ba-Boooom tells the story of her early days gardening at the Ashram when she first tilled the soil, watered and mulched, went inside only to come back later that afternoon to find that the Mali had raked up all the mulch and set it on fire. As I said, mulching your garden is quite simply Not.The.Way.Things.Are.Done!

January 2014

The tomato plants had been growing like a dream and I was keen to built a trellis to help support them grow upwards instead of into the giant tomato thicket they were currently in the process of creating. My neighbours sell bamboo and twine is super cheap around these parts and so with these resources and a bit of research I ended up creating a trellis of horizontal double layers of twine, essentially supporting growth by twisting the tomato branches through each double line of twine for each foot of vertical growth. The trellis was something I'd been wanting to do for a long time but time restraints meant that I just never got around to it. Once the trellis was up I began threading the branches up through it and the finished product worked a treat! The only down side was that in the process I sadly damaged a number of the branches whilst unraveling the colossal mess that their branches were in, so the lesson of doing things before they really need to be done is one which I'll commit to learning.. sometime in the future.. perhaps.. ergh, knowing me probably not.. But once it was done the tomato plants really did continue to grow wonderfully and soon after began putting out hundred of clusters of young fruits which if they were lucky enough to avoid the Bundar charged on to maturity.

 

February 2014

 
In February we returned from Thailand and to be honest, I was a little heart broken coming back into the Resurrection Garden. In the weeks prior to leaving for Thailand there had been a number of wonderful Community Gardening afternoons and the Garden was in the best shape of it's life and was an absolute delight to be in. Upon returning it was like walking into a different garden altogether. With three weeks of my neighbour's uncollected rubbish scattered everywhere, weeds which had gone unchecked and the telltale signs of the presence of veggie thieves, I found it hard to even want to be in there. One of the biggest disappointments was probably the veggie thieves who had helped themselves to my imported elephant Garlic (which was nowhere near ready for harvesting and thus inedible and a complete waste to steal) as I had such big plans to multiply that Garlic and spread it out amongst my local friends who grow their own food so they could continue growing it at their homes. I'll never know who stole it, and even though the safe money is on my landlords - they now own a gun, so I plan to quietly lick my wounds from the safety of my home and never speak of this again!

It took me a couple of weeks before my heart was ready to really invest itself back into the Garden, but once I was ready, I hit it again with passion. And as you can see in the above image, towards the end things began to once again look and feel magical again.

Heirloom Carrots

One aspect of gardening that I'm becoming increasingly excited by is in the arena of heirloom varieties. Whilst I'm still a complete novice in the field I was particularly excited to track down and trial this variety of Purple Carrots. Even though they still had a while to go before reaching full maturity, I'd previously promised Little Feather that she could help me harvest them and as we were only a week away from heading back to Oz I decided it was time for us to put on our Gum boots, march up to the garden and get our hands dirty pulling up a few different varieties of carrot that we'd been growing. Sure they're cheap as chips and take a long time to grow, but eating carrots fresh from the Garden, really, how can you resist?!
 

Rainbow Silverbeet/Chard, Broccoli, Basil, Lettuce, English Spinach, Carrots, Rocket, Kale, Cos Lettuce, Mini Cos, Black Russian, Gross Lissi & Cherry Tomatoes.

 
With only a couple of days left before leaving I decided it was time to get out into the Garden for one final harvest. As you can see from the above shot, it resulted in a fantastic haul of amazing tasting crops and brought a real sense of accomplishment to all the sweat and tears I'd put into this project in the last two years. I've spent so so so many hours in that space, sometimes feeling a great sense of refreshment, sometimes pulling my hair out; constantly battling the monkeys, the rubbish, the weeds, the neighbours, the termites, the years of soil mistreatment, the elements and so to really experience that joy of dig my hands into the earth and pulling out literally arms full of fresh produce really made my heart feel full. I was able to pass out what would have been baskets full of veggies over the wall to my neighbours (yes.. the same ones who send baskets full of their faeces my way) and whilst showing gratitude in these sorts of situation doesn't seem to be a common cultural trait amongst Banarsi folk, I'm pretty sure that somewhere in there there was a bit of love being handed back and forth too. 

February 2014

As a closing though, if you were keen to visit the Resurrection Garden but the thought of forking out thousands of dollars to make the trip to Varanasi doesn't quite appeal to you, I have something which might just be the next best thing. Whilst this is from back in January and certainly isn't as good as being there in the flesh, you do get the benefit of checking it out from the comfort of your own home (which will certainly save you a few rupees)! So have a click on the following link and take a look around (works best on a tablet or smart phone but using the arrow keys on your keyboard is also good) and as my Little Feather likes to say; "Welcome to be here!!"
 
                                                                            >>> The Resurrection Garden 3D <<<

मेरे बगीचे में - In My Garden..

* Time has really gotten away from me these past months and I haven't posted anything about the Resurrection Garden in what feels like forever! Parts of this blog have been sitting around half finished for months so I'm excited to finally release it from it's purgatorial state (otherwise known as the draft folder) and out into the world. *


In mid October 2013 I had 5 of the 7 beds dug out and began throwing about some seed. Much to Wildflower's dismay, I had trays full of seedlings in our house that I'd been growing from seed and they were doing well on the window sill because I was finding that very few seeds that I was direct sowing into the garden were germinating. Over the space of a month I'd wasted quite a few seeds over a few different sowings with very poor results to show for it, and so I start chitting seeds at home to see if I could work out if the problem was with the seeds or if I'd need to start looking elsewhere.

October 2013

 

Chitting the seeds (essentially pre-sprouting seeds on a wet towel/paper) was working a treat and within the month I had 4 trays filled with various kinds of lettuce, spinach, Zucchini, Cucumbers, beetroots, Leeks, tomatoes, squash, broccoli, kale and Rainbow Silverbeet/chard and wanted to get them into the garden as soon as possible. The temperature was slowly coming down more and more so I was keen to try and give my seedlings the best chance to establish before the winter months kicked into high gear, but fighting with the weeds was proving to chew up a considerable amount of my time so things felt like they were progressing at a painfully slow pace. I'd look enviously across the grass at Shookinton's Garden which was overflowing with leafy greens and dream that mine could look so beautiful, but at that point it felt like I was spending so much time just trying to establishing the new plots and liberate the soil of weeds that I'd never get there.

At one point I foolishly began to let myself believe that I was almost finished with all the hard labour of clearing the soil.. then I began tilling the 6th plot and was slapped back into reality. The pile of rocks in the image above is just what I had pulled out of that small plot behind it and it's worth noting that in the past 2 years I've paid 6 day labourers, working a total of 4 days, just to clear the rocks, stones and rubbish from the soil. This pile simply represents what they "missed." 

 

Little Feather taking a tour of the recently completed Resurrection Garden

But all praise be to the Lord on high that there actually came a day in mid-November when I stood amongst the piles of freshly extracted rubbish and random debris, sweat on my brow and covered in compost from head to toe and realised that I'd finally done it; all 7 beds were ready for planting. It's hard to put into words and convey properly what that moment felt like, but after 2 years work, suffice to say it felt good! 

Early November 2013

I'd already planted some seedlings of tomatoes, lettuce, cucumbers, squash, zucchinis, beetroots and broccoli in 3 of the beds that had already been completed and most of them were coming along nicely. My cucumbers began trailing up a wire lattice I had drilled into the back wall and were just starting to form fruits, but the season was getting late and temperatures were dropping and it came to the point where I'd given up hope that they would ever grow big enough to harvest. Their final nail in the coffin was when I came out one morning and found half of the vines hanging dead with a hangman's noose around their necks.

You see, in their daily attempts to recover the downed kites that land on our grass, the kids who live over the garden wall throw rocks tied to lengths of string as far as they can into our property in a series of seemingly never ending an attempts to try and hook the crashed kites then pull them back over the wall. As the rocks are pulled back towards their owner, they drag across the grass, through the garden, occasionally hook onto something of mine and then with one final heave hoist parts of my garden high into the air where they generally become hooked on a nail where they are destined to remain. Even in the design phase I knew this was going to be a potential problem for everything that grows in my garden, but unless I want to be the kind of Scrooge who tells poor kids they can't try and get their kites back when they come down in our yard (and literally hundreds, maybe even thousands of kites come down in our yard each year) then it's just something I have to learn to let go of; even if it means regularly experiencing the loss of my plants. Just chalk it up to one of the many unique (and frustrating) challenges of gardening in Banaras.

Broccoli, Eggplant and Radishes

But much to Wild Flower's elation, by the end of November I had removed most of my seedlings from our house and gotten them into the ground. Sadly the weeds were still fighting their way back into control of any space I would neglect for more than a week or two but I'm taking the long view of my battle with the weeds and feel like I'm taking ground, especially since my straw was delivered and I started heavily mulching the beds. Sadly I have little of a positive nature to say about my rubbish saga (my lovely neighbours still toss any and all of their waste into my garden; be it plastics, organics or faecal) but Kya Karna heh! What's a guy to do?

 

Little Feather harvesting her Radishes

One of the seeds that I always get Little Feather to help me plant is Radishes. I figure the connection between planting a seed and 6 months later harvesting vegetables from it can be a difficult concept to lock in place for little ones and that's why Radishes are great; they germinate within a couple of days and you're harvesting them fully grown around 5 weeks later. And there's just something about watching your kids pulling up handfuls of beautiful shiny red radishes that just fills a papa's heart with glee! So if you're wanting to encourage your kids into the garden and looking for something to grow with them I'd encourage you to stick Radishes right at the top of your list, just above snow peas, non-hearting lettuces and cherry tomates. 

Late November 2013

When it got to the end of November the garden was looking like it was on the verge of kicking into high gear. I still had to be patient with many of the slow to mature crops but it was clear that the tomatoes, lettuces, radishes and broccoli were all thriving and I was genuinely enjoying every second of being out in the garden. I'd regularly grab one or both of the kids and a coffee and come and sit up there in the early mornings and try and enjoy the fact that my son, who had only slept a handful of hours, had once again woken up and started his day before the sun had risen. And you know what? When you're sitting in a place that twelve months ago was a barren wasteland but is now filled with crops that are thriving, it actually does make the mornings for this sleep deprived father just that little bit happier.

Compost; A Love Story..

So by now you've probably worked out that I really like compost. I know it's a weird thing to say, it's a bit like admitting that you're a fan of collecting toe nails, but if you've never dug your bare hands down into a pile of thick, dark, well decomposed, sweet smelling compost, well, you simply haven't lived!

Below is a fairly recent pic I took of the 2 compost bins we've been using here on the property for a number of years. We have a solid supply of good quality ingredients to add to the piles but as I've spoken about before in my post about experimenting with the Berkley Method Of Hot Composting, they just weren't making the grade. The stone slabs look beautiful but they don't allow for air to enter via the sides and air is crucial for the decomposing process. If oxygen cannot penetrate the pile then it becomes anaerobic (meaning that the microorganisms responsible for decomposition process can't survive and thus decomposition grinds to a halt) and unless you want to engage in anaerobic composting (which is possible but not desirable given our circumstances) then the stone slabs simply weren't the ideal way to go.

Last year we left the bays filled with a variety of good things for almost 6 months and came to the end of that period only to discover that they had become so compacted that the majority of the ingredients simply failed to decompose at all. Now one incredibly simple way to counteract this is simply to get in there with a pitch fork and turn the pile a couple of times a week so as to allows air to reenter in amongst all the ingredients, however we have the problem of being a rather small and therefore time-poor community; meaning that we have plenty of responsibilities and not much spare time, let alone enough to dedicate to turning a compost pile every other day. So I began to dream of different ways that we could improve our set up that would give us better results without having to invest more time into it on a regular basis and ended up stumbling into an incredibly simple, extremely cheap and super effective method that could be reproduced anywhere by anyone.

The above photo is the area we're dealing with. The existing stone Compost bays are straight a head, there are piles of broken bricks and stone slabs everywhere, and even though it's all but invisable in the picture, much of the ground is actually paved with smaller stone pieces which have become buried under years of dirt and leaves. We spent a couple of hours clearing the space (which required some serious heavy lifting) and then drove four metal poles into the ground, roughly 1.5m wide and 1.8m long, which would act as the front corners of the new Compost bays. 

I chose to use a reasonably thick gauge wire for the frame as this would have the strength to support the weight of everything we would want to throw into it whilst still having plenty of space to allow as much air as possible to penetrate in from the sides. We drilled this into the brick wall at the rear and linked it with strips of wire to the post at the front and at that point had a very simple compost bay setup.

One thing to consider is that I could have chosen to use only 3 posts for the front so that the middle wire would have acted as a central dividing wall for both bays, but getting air into the pile was the main objective and so using 4 post means that there is a 30cm gap between both piles and thus plenty of room for air to have access.

Next up my dear Aussie brother Nelson and I spent a long and hot summer afternoon drilling hundreds of holes in lengths of PVC pipe. I had given lots of thought about how to try and increase air flow to the center of the pile (the most likely place to become starved of oxygen) and had decided that one option would be to run a couple of lengths of pipe from the outside, straight through the center of the pile. This way oxygen can always be moving through those hard to reach places and keep those microorganisms partying. We lined the pipes up and attached them in a roughly even fashion so as to get air flow through the four quarters of the piles, but my advice today would be to scrap having any pipes up high and instead have them all in the lower half of the pile as that's where it will become the most compacted and the natural airflow will be the most restricted.

I had intended to attach another wire section to the front of each bay, but the guy at the store who sold me the wire did the dirty and charged me for 10m but only gave me 8m, so I didn't have enough wire to complete it on that day and figured I would get back into it soon. However, as time got further and further away from me, I found that it hasn't really been necessary to have a front as we haven't had enough going into the piles for them to spill out onto the path in front but instead they've easily grown higher and higher without having any problems.

We initially set up these new Compost Bays in late August 2013, it's now 3 months later and as you can see the new bays are doing pretty darn well. Some of the pipes broke during this time due to a problem which I doubt many of you will experience (ie; Monkeys jumping up and down on them!), but it is worth trying to make sure that the pipes are resting on the compost in the center without significant gaps beneath them so that they're not trying to support the weight of all that is above it as I suspect this would also cause them to break.

 

To the best of my knowledge, not once during these past three months have either of the piles been turned or aerated by any other means than that which we initially designed. Just this week I finished building my final Vegie Plot in the Resurrection Garden and was keen to pump it full of compost so I pulled out the pipes through the sides of the 2nd bay, racked back the top layer of leaves and other recently added ingredients and was blown away with what lay beneath.

Only 3 months after first building these new bays, the rear one gave out 10+ wheelbarrow loads of gorgeous, gregarious, glorious Compost! All of which went straight into our organic Vegetable Gardens and means that the leaves, grass clippings, food scraps, garden waste, etc. etc. etc. which would otherwise go onto the side of the road, the incinerator or the Ganges, is now enriching the earth, helping feed humanity with nutritious and healthy food and investing back into nature. I really couldn't be happier with how it's turned out.

So if you have a compost pile somewhere out back and the thought of turning it every other day doesn't seem to appeal to you, would it be worth revamping your existing Composting system with any of these brainlessly simple ideas? When compared with last year's stretch of 6 months composting with virtually nothing to show for it, well, it's as my sweet Winnie Wild Flower likes to say, "The pudding is in the cake!"

Composting Hendrix..

 

When I last left off talking about the Resurrection Garden I'd been sharing about the terribly poor soil condition and all the hard work that went into clearing it of rubbish and non-organic debris. That same day after paying my day labours I stood in amongst the (kinda) freshly tilled soil and there was one thing was glaringly obvious; if I wanted this garden to become a thriving slice of paradise then it was going to need an influx of organic matter, and plenty of it!

At the time, we had 2 large compost bins on our community that were each built out of beautiful stone slabs that all up were about 1.5 x 1.5 x 1.5m in size and were pretty much full of good composting materials. We have a couple of very large trees on the property that give off a never ending supply of dried brown leaves, also plenty of grass clippings, kitchen scraps, garden refuse, coffee grinds, eggshells, cardboard and the list goes on. It was monsoon and so the piles were getting a decent soak from time to time and to my mind they should have been plowing along nicely, turning all those rich nitrogen and carbon based goodies into a sweet smelling, rich black soil which would be 'so good you could eat it' (ala Peter Cundall). 

However it was not to be. They were Cold Compost piles and none of us on the community had the time to turn the piles to aerate them with any sort of regularity, and so they were progressively becoming more and more compacted and thus anaerobic; completely shutting down the decomposition process. Shoonkdedy bloom is my gardening buddy and it was to both our surprise that even though the compost bays had been filled for between 6-8 months, the deeper we dug down into those compost bays the less and less things had decomposed. This was a rather deflating discovery to make.

Knowing that it wouldn't be long till monsoon ended and that it would soon be the perfect time to plant all my crops, I wanted compost, lots of it, and I wanted it now! I began devouring any articles on speeding up the composting process that I could get my hands on (and during this time I began to realise that the Gardening Australia website/TV program essentially do the exact same story on compost every other month, just with a different host. I guess there really is only so much you can say about throwing kitchen scraps into a pile hey!). But in all my scouring of the web I did come across one very interesting article that was set to change everything, it was called 'Hot Compost; The Berkley Method.'

Little Feather helping Papa Bear gather leaves for the Berkley Pile

This article outlined the method of Hot Composting developed by the University of California, Berkley, which promised to naturally turn 1.5m³ of raw materials into a rich, highly fine, pathogen free compost in just 18 days. That's right, 18 days. Initially I was super skeptical to say the least, but as I read over the process a number of times it seemed to make a good deal of sense, so I figured why not invest some hope into it and give it a try.

I won't bore you with every step of the process in full detail (that can be done here), but the basic premise is that by getting the right sized pile, stacked in a specific way, comprised of a specific balance of high Carbon materials and high Nitrogen items, getting the right amount of moisture, then exchanging the outside of the pile for the inside (and vise versa) every 2nd day, you'll have created the perfect environment for the bacteria who are responsible for the composting process to pretty much go nuts, and 18 days later you'll be in compost heaven.

Day 1 (Still with about a foot or two of raw materials to be added)

I had desired to be really specific with the whole process and really test the '18 day' claim, but being married with a 2 year old, adapting to a new culture, learning a new language, having only a small window of opportunity to work in the afternoons when the heat isn't too intense... well, I'm guessing you get the point.

Day 4 (Fairly noticeable change already occuring)

Building the pile took around 4 hours (hauling everything around in 8L water buckets as we didn't have a wheelbarrow) and I was quite specific in following the details. Turning the pile turned out to be a much bigger task than first anticipated and all up would take roughly an hour and a quarter each time. In the first week I did great, turning the pile exactly as instructed, but in the subsequent weeks I could only managed to find time to turn the pile at least once every 4-5days and it didn't take long before I could no longer be bothered turning it the time consuming way by exchanging the inside for the out (and vise versa), and so the process was definitely thrown of track and clearly effected the outcome.

The process itself is quite remarkable though. The pile heats up so much that you are able to put pretty much anything in there and it will break down (including weeds with seeds, pathogens/diseased plants, roadkill, etc.) and I discovered on around day 8 that when a section of it falls on our foot you actually get burnt! I've since read all sorts of things that people do to utilize this naturally generated heat - my favourite being building your pile around a coiled pipe that is connected to your water system that you can feed water through in order to take a naturally heated hot water shower. I love this kinda stuff!

Week 4.5 (The final product)

When it reached the 18 day period it was clear that my Berkley pile was not the glorious mountain of humus I'd dreamed of, but there was no denying that those lil bacteria had found a great place to be getting it on as a tremendous amount of decomposition had taken place. I kept the pile going, turning it as often as I could and somewhere around the 4.5 week mark monsoon ended and it was time to put some seeds in the earth and so I began shoveling out the compost. As you can see in the above image, there's still a little ways to go before it would have been completely done, but to make this quality of compost in just 1 month.. Shabaaash! ("excellent" in Hindi)

So if you have the garden, the time and most importantly the desire, I would most definitely encourage you to give the Berkley Method a crack. It was a lot of hard work, but the benefits of this style of Hot composting Vs. Cold composting are obvious and numerous (apparently you can even Hot Compost your old cat!). And the change that adding this much organic matter to the soil made was instantly noticeable (you can see the difference in soil quality in the above image between whats on the shovel and whats beneath it!) and led to a far superior growing season. But I'll be saving more about that for next time!

* The title of this post 'Composting Hendrix' kinda gives away a bit how my brain works..
To this day I can't hear the word 'Berkley' without immediately associating it with this moment and this guy!