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An Odor in the
Air
Have you ever thought of one of those
brilliant ideas that makes you grin ear to ear? You know, one of those ideas that's going
to make your life easier somewhere down the road. Maybe you were smart enough to install
drip irrigation with everything you've ever planted in your garden and now you get to
spend more time enjoying the garden instead of watering it. Or maybe you've been
composting kitchen and garden waste long before garden writers suggested it wasn't all
that difficult and it was a good way to save the landfills from filling up too quickly.
Well this desert gardener got one of those incredible once in a lifetime ideas and grinned
ear to ear thinking how darn smart I'd become. I mean we should all be so smart.
The Reasoning
A couple times a year I hop in the truck and
drive to a garden center and buy 15, maybe 20, bags of steer manure. Besides
compost, manure is an inexpensive way to improve desert soils. It's also a method of
recycling. Hey it's helping out the environment. And yes I always feel like an idiot
because I'm paying for the stuff because I know people with horses and they'd love me to
show up with my truck and a shovel to haul away their horse waste.
Usually after I load
the bags of manure into the truck's bed and then climb into the cab I no longer
smell "fresh". I'll crank up the air conditioning in the summer and roll down
the window in the winter. Which ever I do, the truck ends up smelling bad for a couple of
days and my clothes don't smell all that pleasant until they're washed.
So here comes the flash of brilliance. I was having 225 concrete bricks delivered and
there was going to be a service charge no matter how much I had delivered. Why not have a
bunch of bags of manure delivered at the same time as the bricks from the home and garden
center? I wouldn't have to get my clothes dirty and my truck wouldn't have to stink and my
back wouldn't ache. So how many bags did I need? Fifteen? Twenty? Nope, I decided on an
entire pallet. That's 75 bags of the stuff. Gosh, I wouldn't have to buy any manure for a
couple of years. Can you see the logic? It certainly seemed like an incredibly smart idea
at the time. Then the store delivered the manure.
The Problem(s)
A three wheeled forklift was used to place the pallet of 75 bags of steer manure in
my driveway. Although the entire 75 bags of manure were wrapped in plastic and there was a
light afternoon breeze I could smell the manure. And so could every fly in the
neighborhood. It suddenly came to my attention that the manure needed to be moved and
that's when I uttered, "Oh manure!" My life had not gotten easier. I had to
unwrap the plastic from around the 75 bags which exposed those bags of somewhat moist
manure to the hot desert sun. By then I had a swarm of flies buzzing around my ears and
the bags seemed to be getting hotter and hotter from the inside out. The stuff was still
composting inside those plastic bags.
At that moment I thought about putting a "For Sale, As Is" sign out in front
of the house but I knew that was not a brilliant idea. I don't get brilliant ideas. The
manure fiasco I was living at the time had proven that. I mean I spent the next hour or so
loading up my wheelbarrow with four bags of manure at a time. That's 19 trips to the
manure pallet. That's 75 heavy bags of hot manure I lifted. I ended up with three piles of
manure bags spread around my property. I swear I heard one of my neighbors say,
"What's that smell?" to his wife while they were sitting in their back yard. She
said something about their being an awful lot of flies. All I wanted to do was go inside
and take a shower. I doubted I'd ever get the smell of manure off me or my clothes.
The Lesson Learned
I've still got 65 bags of steer manure
scattered around my yard. I've still got more flies than I want and I think the neighbors
are starting to tell stories about the crazy gardener that lives next door. And yes, I've
learned a valuable lesson from the experience and I'm willing to share it with other
gardeners so they don't make the same mistake that I did. Here's what I learned:
Next time I get
a brilliant idea, I'd better make darn good and sure it doesn't stink.
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