ASH PILE, TRASH PILE
(Page 2 of 2)
November/December 1970
by RUTH HAMPTON
I can't say I'd never heard of compost: I had. I thought it was some thing you bought in garden stores. But I was running out of room, so I started putting clippings on the fruit pile. They promptly and conspicuously soured! That did it. The men were not about to try loading the smelly mess, even the kids were avoiding the back yard and I made it a point never to be outside when the neighbors were.
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Desperation set in. I took the shovel and began to fling dirt. Sand from the sandpile, gravel from the driveway, soil and bark from out by the woodpile. I heaped it on until the air began to clear. I added a few big rocks—of which there were plenty—loaded up the youngsters and took off to my sister-in-law's for a box of the plants she'd been offering me for years . . . and which I'd managed to avoid until then.
She gave me pansies, hen-and-chickens, and sedums. Lo and behold! I had a rock garden instead of a trash heap.
Years of strawberries, glade, vegetables and fruit trees later, I am a shovel-packing, manure-toting organic gardener who regards the death of anything from a marigold to a mouse as fair game for the compost heap. Like any enthusiast, I'm a missionary too, proselyting at the flip of a seed catalog. I realized just how far my message had gone the day I got an excited call from a non-gardening friend.
"Ruth, guess what!"
"This you, Velma? What?"
"Remember that rock garden you made out of your ash heap?"
"Ash heap. You mean trash heap?"
"Ash, trash. What's the difference? I just planted two dozen pansies in the ash pile. . ."
Two years later, those same plants, set in about one inch of soil and two feet of ashes are flourishing and have multiplied into quite a flower bed. Proving, once more, that nature won't waste anything if we won't.
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