My children say that I am the only one they know that gets all excited about a compost pile, but I bet Granny would understand my enthusiasm.<<<
Yes, granny understands........LOL
On my trips for the rotten horse manure, a woman who lived across the street, [I sold them the land they were on], would send her husband to help me load all my barrels, so that I had a pickup load.
I have not worked in many years with a large pile, but did keep small ones going in the greenhouses.
They worked fine, the bottom less trash cans, when I sat a rabbit cage on top of the can, fed the rabbit and put weeds, etc in the can and every week or so, stuck the water hose in the can to water the bed.......LOL, my version of a ‘rabbit factory’.
I shouldn’t take the credit for the idea, our niece lived with us and wanted a pet rabbit, so we got her one, but it was a winter of snow, so he went in the greenhouse.
I had a planter box of lettuce and it did not grow, so when Kendra cleaned her cage, I told her to toss the droppings in that bed, thinking that it would help for the next crop.
In a week the lettuce was growing beautifully.
I still think that a track [pipe suspended from the ceiling?] with a rabbit cage that could be pushed down the track, would work for fertilizing the entire plant bed........But Bill said NO.....LOL. Truth is, he did not like all my ideas.
Yes, I have noticed that we ate better in the hard times, than we did in the richer times. It takes too much of ones time to get rich, there are not enough hours to do both.
What fun, getting enough bread for the animals and neighbors too, it is more fun to share.
One of the shocks for me, Kingman and the surrounding area is not a friendly town and they do not share, I think that is why I liked Wellton, we were all poor and if a farmer said “I will plow tomorrow, get what you can salvage tonight, of the crop still in the fields, the men did and delivered it to the neighbors, lettuce, squash, grapes, whatever the crop was.
I have even had the rancher that we bought our alfalfa hay from come to the house and say “Ruth, I have ordered irrigation water for the fields, so get all the broken bales that you can, tonight...........for free.
LOL, the hardest that I ever worked, was at Mary’s one day, Bob, who bought and leased her farm, saw me there and told me that I could have all the bales in the field, as he was burning it ......Do Not every go to load hay, in shorts.......
We hooked Mary’s old trailer to my pickup and Mary at 75 years of age and I hauled hay to her place, until the fire reached us.
We were a year, getting it all moved to our place 6 or so miles away.
Bill fell in love with Kingman and we moved here, if I had known it was such a cold/selfish town, I would have stayed in Wellton.
I thought it was something wrong with me, but then some of the people that I sold places to, left for the same reason.
I look back at Wellton and find it was the best part of my life, we fought to survive and the challenge of surviving is a lot better than writing a check for every thing.
Your experience in the hay field reminds me of the days helping hubby hay. Shorts are certainly not appropriate!! One day, the knotter on our old baler was not working and we stood to lose a whole field of hay (several hundred bales) so it became my chore to sit on the end of the baler and “trip” the knotter when needed. After several hours of tripping the knotter, I was completely grayish black from head to toe with hay dust. Only my eyes showing any white and ITCHY all over. How good that shower felt when I got home.
We have always been blessed with old equipment as hubby LOVES to take things apart and try to improve on the mechanism, sometimes with disastrous results. He should have been an inventor. Hubby would like to grow rabbits, but I know I could never eat them. We had to stop raising hogs as they can make you grow attached to them if you talk to them and scratch them. When butchering time came, I would hide in the bedroom until they were taken away to the butchers and then couldn't bring myself to eat them. I am such a whusss./p>
I think the problem with Kingman is that it’s made up of people from Phoenix who couldn’t make it in the city (or got tired of the heat) and went looking for someplace cheaper. My daughter said there is a lot of meth use up there. Meth makes people crazy - it’s the worst drug ever made up. If there ever was a satanic drug, meth is it.