I often have a song in my head as I work on my land, but today I had two totally possessing my brain. Jimi Hendrix's Castles Made of Sand pirouetted around my brain with the Black Eyed Peas' Where is the Love? the whole time I was there. I think I'll have to get a ghetto blaster so I can exorcise songs when they become too persistent.
Perhaps it was to do with the repetitive nature of the task in hand, which is currently moving a large pile of clods of earth and grass from the surface of an expanse of black plastic, which is acting as a floating mulch over a large overgrown bed which I hadn't had time to deal with in the Spring when all green things were taking over. There were too many clods to put on the compost heap, and anyway there was a large amount of couche grass and bindweed in them which I didn't want to recycle. I hoped that by spreading them over the plastic the sun would dry the weeds to crisps. It didn't quite happen that way. The weeds just took root and carried on regardless.
This month I had more or less got through all the top soil in the top soil bin, so it was the right time to transfer the clods there. As I began to work though, I realised that in fact rather a lot of decomposition had taken place in clodworld. There was now much more topsoil there than weeds, and on closer inspection quite a bit of it seemed to be rather good compost. So I began the task of sifting through it all, placing all the humous and still green stuff on the compost heap, and all the topsoil on the topsoil heap. It reminded me of those moralistic fairy tales in which a girl has to do painstaking and repetitive tasks in order to be transformed into a golden haired princess or suchlike. Not quite like that in real life, but the end result was nevertheless very rewarding. I have now almost finished, and I have two piles of very useful growing aids.
I took care to layer the heap with green and brown matter alternately with the humousy clod matter as the heap took shape. I had enough green matter, but didn't have any spare brown. The only candidates being the teasels, and I like to preserve their structural beauty in situ until I need to use them as firelighters.
My heap is a very learned erudite one, and does like some good reading material when he is busy digesting himself. I like to provide him with only the best literature printed with vegetable ink. A great favourite is Lush Times. I know I stored one in the shack for just such an occasion as this, when I had run out of brown matter. I looked everywhere but it certainly wasn't in the shack any more. I wondered if the heap had sneaked in during the night and taken it. So I had to look elsewhere, and suddenly I realised that there was in fact brown matter right next door in my neighbours' allotments. Neither of them spends very much time in them at all, so they are totally overgrown and neglected. My good fortune though, as I was able to gather a plentiful supply of old brown stalks of cow parsley and tall daisies and create lovely aerating layers with it on my heap.
It now looks like a layer cake, but for plants to eat not humans. A bit like the pets' cakes on Blue Peter. Looks weirdly edible, but you know it would be a mistake to try.
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