Happy Birthday to Beatrice!

Yes, there's a first time for everything!

This is the only day of the year that I can give my sister Beatrice shit and not get her mad!
And look! It has your name all over it!

Compost- the black gold that will make your garden the envy of all the other gardeners! And piles and piles of it... delivered by the producers directly to your Cromwell garden.
Just look; even in the dead of winter, flowers sprout, as if by magic:

And we've arranged to have it shipped, factory fresh-

(Yup! that's the factory) straight to you by the truckload, eliminating (get it?) the middle man. (Actually, it's been perfectly aged in our open-air aging chambers and tossed and rotated lovingly.)
So... Happy Birthday to you, Beatrice!
xxoo
Rita, Bob, Jules the Dog and (most importantly) Maggie the Mexican Pony.
(I had to do something different! You'll either love this or hate it...)

At Play in the Fields of the Horse

So Crispin may be going through a tough few days, but he excels in manure production! We obtain at least a wheelbarrow full every day. I have been joking that Bob and I fight about who's going to clean up the pasture every morning; it's actually a very pleasant way to spend a quiet 15 or 20 minutes with Crispin. Most mornings Bob beats me to the task while I'm away on my walk with Jules.
And we truly mean this: anyone who wants some manure...C'mon down! It's easy to get as we truck it up to the vegetable garden which is right next to the driveway. Take it home and compost it or layer it directly onto your garden beds and by spring it will be all broken down and good to go. Your garden will thank you!

Manure and Me

Here I am with our first deposit for the compost pile. The horse farm where Crisco the Stallion* lives has manure heaps to rival the mighty Himalayas. Trust me, I was told that horses produce something on the order of fifty pounds of manure a day so there's plenty to go around. (The horse farm has somewhere around fifty horse. Do the math!)

This pile is located directly next to where the vegetable garden is going. We've gotten smarter: we used to place things like wood piles and then move them eight or nine times. When the horse comes home to live (after we put up a fence) the manure situation will be that much easier. Shoveling shit is hard work and composting is a fine art.

*No, Crisco is not a stallion (he's a gelding) and his name is actually Crispin. But my mother (aka Mommy) couldn't remember his name but knew he was white (like shortening, I guess!) and told her neighbor that his name was Crisco. The neighbor inquired as to whether he was a stallion, so the name fit!