News flash! Stop the presses! ProfessorRoush has won the gardener's lottery! Sunday, I noticed that my southern neighbor was out doing chores, so I walked down the road to greet him with idle chatter. He was out removing the dried remnants of native Baptisia australis (Wild False Indigo) from his western fence line. Baptisia blow around like tumbleweeds out here on the prairie and then act to catch snow drifts and help pull down fences. During a 20 minute conversation, that mainly consisted of cursing the damned Baptisia, another neighbor came driving up in the way of country folk, whose neighborhood meetings are often spontaneous roadside conclaves convened to discuss the weather and current state of the Kansas State Wildcats football team.
This latter neighbor, however, had an agenda. She wanted to ask me if I'd like to be the beneficiary of weekly reoccurring five gallon tubs of purest manure from her horses. Would I??? Quickly picking my jaw up off of the gravel, and putting aside any qualms about who I'd have to kill for her in trade for the manure, I accepted on the spot and without reservations, doing a little dance of joy in my soul.
I'd been wondering, in my treeless landscape, how to make up for the compost generated annually from the 50 or so bags of leaves that another friend had previously supplied. That, now former, friend had listened too well to my advice about starting her own compost pile and, thusly realizing the value of what she had been giving away, had chosen to cut off my pre-compost supply.
It seems, however, that what the Garden Gods taketh away, they giveth back, in plentiful greenish nodules of purest gold. I finally stopped to take the photo above after I had already emptied half the tub around some rose plants and realized that I should stop to commemorate the occasion. From this day forth, every Saturday will find me picking up another five gallon bin of odoriferous splendor, and spreading it to the hungry roses. My garden is now a happy place, and destined to remain so until the first rainy Spring day when Mrs. ProfessorRoush opens the windows and learns what I've been up to.
