Brown Is the New Black (Gold, That Is)

Tip: If you use a lot of milk and vanilla-flavored coffee, you can use much less powdered cocoa mix to make your mocha delicious with less sugar!

But that's not the brown to which I'm referring. 

Here's a riddle:

What is BROWN, flies love it, it's slightly warm, you can wash it from your hands, you can shovel it (if you remembered your shovel - damn!), my car is full of it (but I am not), and....idiots like me will pay six dollars a bag for it?

My tomato plants have been sagging, and Rad reminded me that you're supposed to bury new tomato plants up to the bottom leaves, so this weekend I set about to re-do my gardening slapdashery of two weeks ago.  (I'd give you lovely before-and-afters if I could find my camera, but I'm not allowed to look for my camera until I find my phone.)

Ladies in my office have been trying to seduce me over to the world of organic heirloom tomatoes, lemon-shaped cucumbers and fancy-pants flowers (one of these women won county fair blue ribbons for her organic sugar snap peas and begonias, so I'm a little out of my depth), but our backyard is unfortunately on the Northeast side of our house, so I just wanted to Miracle-Gro the heck out of some of the "Guaranteed-to-Grow!" hits from OSH (like zucchini - bleah) and see whether anything would take. 

Oh, besides the bad sun exposure, we seem to have ridiculously bad soil.  We're in a rental, though, so I don't want to spend too much time and attention (read: $$) on true soil amendation.  Also because doesn't poor soil equal more flowers or fruits or something?  That's my story, anyway.

(The rental agency said we had to free rein to improve the backyard as we saw fit, but I get the impression they say this to everyone and then just throw pavers over everything when each renter moves out.  Our backyard has a small concrete patio area, and then half of it is brick pavers sloppily covering the remainder, with bark filling in the gaps.  It's really homely, and as I was pulling up pavers, I've found little identifier markers for nasturtiums and basil, found an iris plant trying to come up, and - this weekend - dug up a half-buried rose bush.  It has a couple of leaves, but I'm not sure it's long for this world.  We'll see.  And every time I turn over one of these bricks, I find a gross mess of ants, spiders, potato bugs, larvae, worms, weird salamander-type things that look like worms, and baby snails.  I've read that the snails in California are true eating snails, the kind you get when you order escargot - they were imported for food, then went feral - and this tempts me to encourage them, but it seems unwise to eat them since you don't know what poisons your neighbors have been laying out, and, if you're not hunting them, they really do a lot of plant damage.  So I also don't want to do too much in the way of improvement, if it's all just going to get paved over anyway. )

But so this weekend I was digging around and feeling pretty bad for the poor seedlings and decided to pony up for some nice bedding for the little guys.  BACK to OSH, where I felt virtuous for spending an extra dollar to get Organic Soil, rather than just dirt (I don't know where the term "dirt cheap" came from, but it was not after a visit to OSH). 

But a) I found myself treating it like some precious material, mixing it up and thinning it out with regular dirt, b) I was outraged at paying $6 for a bag of DIRT, and c) I felt kind of guilty because I'm trying to buy local when I can lately, and I'm sure my organic dirt was not local.  Cocoa hulls and bat guano are not typical Silicon Valley exports.  So I was feeling bad about the fossil fuels that were spent in getting the bat poop from there to here.  (I've sworn off bottled water for the same reason, even at great personal expense.  I was totally dehydrated and thirsty during my bike ride Saturday and would not allow myself to buy water, knowing I was "only" an hour or so from the nearest free faucet.  And also because I'd forgotten to bring any money.)

So resolved to make our own compost heap.  Ace is concerned about stink and animals, but I seem to recall from prior experience that if it's not too wet and you don't throw meat or cooked foods in there, it doesn't smell like anything.  So I swept up the backyard and threw it in a pile, and added the trimmings from last night's spinach.  Now we wait.

Then I woke up this morning, remembering, I think compost is like sourdough, you need a little starter to get things going.  So today at lunch, I had to go home anyway because I'd forgotten some work; I grabbed a couple of buckets and headed on over to the recyclery, which promised free compost.  I lined up behind some stinky trucks and some kid paying big money to throw away his TV (dude - that's what Craig's List is for!) - only to arrive, to the sound of swelling strings, at the dump. 

Sure enough, there it was - a big, brown mound the size of a haystack - radiating heat and buzzing with flies.  I hadn't thought to pack a shovel, but was grateful it occurred to me to bring buckets.   

So now my car is full of it.  I am at my desk, working away, while three buckets of, of, whatever is in there, lie quietly in my backseat and my trunk.  I wish I'd thought to crack a window.

Comments

[TasterSpoon]

I stand corrected. Aforementioned office gardener set me straight in an e-mail:

"As I remember correctly 4 or 5 first place ribbons (couple 2nd, 3rd and hon. ment.)?

"Aster
Snow peas
Butterfly bush

"The years are blending on me: Avocado?, Basil?, Nasturtium?, Zinnia?, Gerber Daisy?, Love in the Mist?, Mint?, Gladiola?, Rose?, Oregano?, Dill? Rosemary?, Fuchsia? I just can't remember what the other one or two were last year, but know that the these were sometime in my past.

"FYI…the Alameda County Fair opens 6/23/07 : ) Already making my plans!!!!!"

And now I'm making MY plans.

[Steve Reed]

What's brown and sounds like a bell?

[TasterSpoon]

I don't know!!

What's brown and sticky?

[Steve Reed]

Brown and sounds like a bell? DUNG! (said with ringing intonation)

Brown and sticky? I don't know!!

[boots]

My horses are compost making fiends. But I've heard that 1 year old "horse compost" is better than fresh for feeding the wee plants. Something about the nitrogen levels. Still, it costs significantly less than $6/bag to try it. It should be free if you find someone with a horse nearby (sometimes horse people even post ads to attract interested gardeners). Think of it as a different kind of dump. And talk about local.

[Scooter]

A stick?

[TasterSpoon]

Yes! A stick!

What is green and fuzzy, has four legs, and if it fell out of a tree would probably kill you?

[Scooter]

Pool table?

No, wait. One of those caterpillars hanging from the trees in Palo Alto.

[TasterSpoon]

Usually I get a bigger laugh with the pool table.

And by "laugh" I mean a puzzled "oh."

I am SO OVER the fuzzy caterpillars. I was reading an article about how they infested the trees at Stanford last year - when they drop down on their strings it means the trees are already OVERCROWDED. People, these guys cover every surface. And they eat the tree leaves. And apparently they irritate the skin. And their cocoons are not cute at ALL.

We rode under a tree of hangy caterpillars on Saturday and I got some on me - I was itchy all day. I thought it might be all in my head because I had read that article, but when I got home and showered I had little bumps right where I thought they were. Sick. Sick, sick, sick.