Adding 20 Yards of Compost

Remember this huge donation of compost we received earlier this spring?  Today is the day to move it all!  The garden was tilled up yesterday and now it is time to begin adding this to the rows.  I did have a group that wanted to volunteer today,  but the Memorial Day weekend got into the mix and they canceled. I put out an SOS to my wonderful volunteers and had three that were free to help.

So my father brought one of his tractors out and scooped up bucket fulls of the compost.  We tried to help with wheelbarrows, but the dirt in the garden is so fine (all that sandy loam) that it was like pushing the wheelbarrow through quick sand.  And the compost is so wet from the deluge of rain we had all last week, that the wheelbarrow weighed about 200 pounds, so even pushing it on grass was a challenge.  We gave up quickly - and were very thankful for the tractor!!

 

Slowly my father backed down the rows and we used our muscle and oomph to rake out small quantities of the compost then spread it out fairly thinly on top of the rows.  The rows are 4-foot wide, and the bucket was 5-foot, so we tried our best to keep the compost contained to a 4-foot wide area.  Sometimes we succeeded, other times it became a bit wider.  All in all went pretty well.

It took the three of us 4 hours to spread it out.  We got 6 rows out of it.  I have to go back next week and use the wheelbarrow to move one large pile at the end of a row.  But it can wait.

Now I just have a big black spot where the compost was dumped.  I might get some grass seed to help encourage re-growth.  The folks at Brighton NC Machine did not seem concerned about it.  They really are a great bunch of people out there.