Creek Running North

There’s a stable up at the top end of the Pinole Creek watershed, up in the remnant horse country around Briones, that has as its mission treating horses well, fostering a true partnership between horse and rider, and I figured those horses are very likely offered the best hay available, pure cut alfalfa or timothy with a little mustard, a little yarrow maybe, a few hours every day in the hills noshing on wild oats.

This sort of diet would result in the kind of shit I want in my vegetable garden, I told myself. I called yesterday morning to see if there was any for the taking. The answer, when you call a stable asking if they will let you take some horse shit home with you, is always yes. The phone call is necessary, but it serves mainly as notice of one’s impending arrival. At noon Tuesday I got to the stable, looked around a bit for the pile. I had some trouble finding it, which was unusual: the manure pile is usually a very prominent feature of any stable. There was a crew building a retaining wall, and — after taking a moment to decide that ”mierda” was probably rude and racking my brain until I remembered ”abono” — I decided to ask them. But I didn’t have to: as I approached the retaining wall I found the pile. It was hidden in a spotless white dumpster eight feet high. This was good news: there was less likelihood that weed seeds would have blown onto the pile over time, infiltrated every crevice of it the way they always did with the pile up at the Grizzly Peak Stables, which was open to the prevailing winds and faced several hundred thousand acres of invasive grasses and star thistle. Never again!

I spent some time positioning the truck, climbing up onto the pile and gauging how likely I was to be able to fill the truck bed without making a mess. Trying to back up to the east side of the dumpster I felt the back end sink a bit, and when I put it back in first the right rear wheel spun and dug itself in. The good thing about getting stuck when you’re fixing to load up your truck with horse shit, which I have done before, is that unless you are a complete idiot you have brought a shovel. I finally got the truck nuzzled up to a firm spot on the south side of the dumpster and climbed back up to the shoveling deck.

Well-rotted horse manure is an absolute pleasure to work with in large quantities, almost like potting soil but with a faint aroma of fungus and leaves. This stuff was not well rotted. I doubt that the top layer had rotted for more than about 18 hours since departing the horse. I started shoveling, taking little bites: three or four pounds per shovel load. There was a breeze from the south, which was pleasant and relatively cool and which kept the ammonia down to a minimum. Not that there was all that much ammonia in the stuff: the stable used a lot of bedding, little bits of cellulose that I suppose might once have been rice hulls, and they absorbed the urine nicely. Carbon and nitrogen equals compost: I got a shovel’s depth down and the abono was too hot to touch with an ungloved hand.

You’re not really supposed to add fresh horse manure to your garden beds. A little at a time is no big deal: a few root hairs might get singed from the excess nitrogenous salts in the urine, but most plants can cope with a tiny bit of fertilizer burn. But an entire bed full of the stuff? I have a little over fifty feet of raised bed in back here, and about a third of that is now filled with 100 percent caca de caballo, still somewhat redolent after a day of watering. I tell myself that the nitrogen will leach down into the subsoil where the rest of the garden can use it, until I remember that until recently I had a housemate whose job description was putting nitrogen onto the soil in the back yard. My back yard needs no more nitrogen for now.

But I get ahead of myself.

My truck holds a bit more than a yard of manure. Actually, it holds a bit more than a yard of whatever I put in there, or air when I don’t. A bit more than a yard of moist horse manure, as it happens, weighs more or less exactly the maximum recommended payload for my make of truck, 1,500 pounds and change. It’s like my truck was meant for this very task, and it did not complain when it hauls all this the eight miles back to my driveway. Which put a damper on my complaining to myself that I’d actually be lifting every bit of this 1,500 pounds of manure three times today. Once to put it in the truck, a second time to move it from the truck to the wheelbarrow, and finally to lift the wheelbarrow over the garden bed wall because I am too lazy to build a ramp. No matter: I will recoup every calorie and more, eating the food I’ll grow in that wealth of future humus.

Instead, I decided to complain about the fine-grained, urine-soaked bedding working its way into every crease and corner of my clothing.

Even that turned out not to bother me, though, despite my thwarted wish that I could rub my eyes to get the sweat out of them, which would have been a Very Bad Idea. I found myself enjoying this throwing of myself into a gigantic pile of shit. The reality — as I began to remember about 300 pounds in — is unutterably more pleasant than the office politics machinations for which it has often stood as metaphor. This is a good thing, because I need to bring home another yard. Another 4500 pounds of lifting, and then watering for a week or so to mix the horsepiss with the Zekepiss down there in my Strategic Nitrogen Subsoil Reserve, and then perhaps a gallon or so of redworms will come home with me as outdoor pets and co-workers to form their Darwinian vegetable mould. In the meantime, I am sprouting seeds of red orach, a gift from mi gemela, and perhaps I’ll do some experimenting, to see if the stronger of the seedlings will grow in the unadulterated stuff. If I can take it, the other edible weeds surely can.