Compost

I'm still working on the compost pile here at the ranch. Right now, it's just a corner of the garden where we throw stuff: eggshells, coffee grounds, banana peels, cat turds, chicken shit. It isn't this finely organized lasagna-layered textbook-orderly stratum of waste by-products designed for optimum fermentation in order to produce rich organic compost; no, it's a big pile of rotting crap and trash that I'll rototill into the ground this winter and hopefully it won't contain so much ammonia that it kills everything we plant. We're novices at this gardening crap - we're just not old enough, we're not retired, we don't have endless time on our hands, and we're not British. We just like to eat. We got great zucchini last year - monstrous, mutant zucchini, as big as a man's leg. We got a bumper crop of hot peppers and tomatoes the year before. And tender yellow squash. But our potatoes and onions disappeared. Thriving one minute, dead and gone the next. I dug in the dirt in vain looking for a potato or onion, finding nothing but want.