Compost: The Holy Grail

(I wish my compost pile smoked like this.)

My wife and I always have a large vegetable garden. It has never produced all that well. My wife blames me; I blame the soil. Our soil here in southern Tompkins County is clayish and is always in need of more organic matter. It tends to be soggy in early summer and then bone dry in late summer. It is obvious that one answer would be to add that rich, black, loamy material that one can produce by composting. Ahhh, compost--farmers' gold, Jayhawks' jewels, pioneers' platinum, homesteaders' heaven, cornhuskers' crack. Well, you get the idea--it is rich stuff.

To produce compost you simply mix together "green" material with "brown" material. Green material is fresh plant stuffs like grass clippings or kitchen waste, and the greens are your source of nitrogen. Brown material is dried plant stuffs, like old leaves or straw, and this is your source of carbon (=sugars). The nitrogen to carbon ratio in the compost pile is critical to get the pile to do what a proper compost pile is supposed to do--cook. If mixed properly with sufficient moisture, microorganisms multiply in the pile, and their biological activity raises the internal temperature of the pile to about 170 degrees F. The high heat, naturally produced, decomposes the plant material, kills insects, pathogens, and weed seeds, and results in a beautiful mound of black, loamy compost that can be used to amend your lousy soil. I have this vision of looking at my compost pile from afar one cool morning and seeing steam slowly rising from a smoldering heap.

Has never happened. I have built compost piles for about 20 years, and I can never get the temperature of the damn thing warmer than the gravel in my driveway. On the other hand, my younger brother Bill, who lives in Corvallis, Oregon, loves to call me and describe the trash cans full of fantastic compost that he has produced. He produces so much compost that his entire backyard of perennial flower and vegetable gardens is grown in compost only. He doesn't even use the Willamette Valley soil that God put behind his house some time ago. He uses only compost, HIS compost, HIS BEAUTIFUL compost, HIS BEAUTIFUL COPIOUS amounts of compost. I now use my caller ID not to answer the phone when I see that Oregon area code, because I can not stand to hear about HIS compost victory one more time.

And then yesterday morning, it happened. I dutifully checked my pile like I always do and, what the heck, there was heat. Not scorching heat, but an unmistakable increase in temperature that I could feel with my hand. I had to tell Robin right away. I ran to the house screaming "We have heat!", stubbed my large toe on the top rung of the garage stairs as I skipped up the steps, fell into the laundry room just inside the house, and banged my head on the washing machine. I was excited, happy, angry, in pain, and out of breath, all at the same time. I was like a carbon:nitrogen ratio that had gotten all out of kilter. I described to my wife that we had heat in the compost pile but, I must say, she was not nearly as impressed as I had hoped. But, never mind, I had a prideful lilt in my step all day, aside from a small limp.

But by evening, it was gone. What the hell? No heat at all. What kind of a cruel joke is this? Had I imagined the whole thing? Had I incurred that lump on my head for nothing? What will Robin think now? What happens when my brother calls? Within an hour, I had calmed myself into my usual passive state about how life is not fair and don't expect it to be. If my soil sucks and I can't grow beautiful veggies, so be it. Farmers in Iowa might have great soil, but they don't have the Finger Lakes. My brother might have great compost, but he has larger slugs. New York pioneers might have been able to live off the land here, but they didn't have a Toro rototiller. So I'm doing ok. And after all, we can buy tomatoes Saturday at the local Farmers Market.

I'm makin' money with Google Adsense

(Keep clicking friends.  I made about three cents today.)

When I started this blog, I signed up for Google's Adsense program. This is the program that places ads on your site automatically based on the content of your blogs. Today, those ads appeared from Googlelandia like magic. And my Adsense report shows that so far I have made $.01. Every time someone comes to my blog (called an "impression") and every time someone clicks on one of those ads, I make money. Since the ads appeared, probably sometime last night, there have been 5 impressions, which I think is worth a penny. An actual click on an ad is worth more, I think, but I will find this out today when one of you clicks on "Cigar Humidor", or some other ad. By the way, it is absolutely illegal to click on your own ads; this is referred to as "click fraud", and Google will squeeze your family jewels in a vice for that offense.

Now, I didn't start this blog to make money. I wanted to blog because when you have taught classes for 30 years and then stop, your mouth keeps on going even though you are only talking to the black lab at your feet. If you suppress the talking, your blood pressure goes up, you drool more and, well, I explained all of that in a previous post. I just have a need to tell someone what I saw or what I am thinking. So consider this post as a "truth in advertising" thing, where I am explaining that I make beaucoup bucks when you come here and click. For example, at this rate of earning power, I could comfortably buy a Whopper at the end of a year, with some coin left over.

On the other hand, this is kinda cool. The Adsense report gives me an idea of how many people are coming to this site. We all want to know if we are having any kind of effect in life, and if no one reads your words, you are certainly NOT having any effect. So my approach is to lure you in with cute or sexy images (like family jewels in a vice), give you some information that you might actually enjoy hearing (like the chickadees are nesting now), and then slap you in the face with something that really concerns me about the world (like we are all going to hell in a hand basket). But this is only Day 4, so no slapping yet. Just show up, and read this over with your favorite beverage, and click a little more. I would like to buy a soda with that Whopper.

Time for Noah's ark?

(The webbing between my toes is now nearly complete.)

Yesterday's downpour was the most rain I have ever seen fall at my house in Ithaca in 29 years, maybe the hardest rain I have ever seen in my life. It came down in sheets for a solid 30 minutes. It is exactly the kind of rain in parts of the West that results in flash floods that kill people. I had water flowing on my property in places where I have never seen moving water. And of course, it rained almost every day in June, much of July, and now more of the same in August. Fortunately, we live near the top of the hill surrounded by forest, so the chances of sliding off into an abyss is small. If this is the new normal, I may as well live in Costa Rica where I can find really good rice and beans, and cheap rum.

How wild animals endure these weather events is not clear to me, because who wants to be out there trying to find out? I have hummingbirds all over the place this summer, and I assume they are sitting under the protective cover of some tree branch. But it would be fascinating to observe the exact location and position they assume. After the rain, I walked through my woodlot and saw water flowing through a buried hollow log that I know is a runway for short-tailed shrews. Where the heck did they go? On the other hand, these large slugs we have in abundance this summer must have popped the top on a cold one, closed their sun umbrella, and rolled over on their backs to get more comfortable. It would have been a great time to make more slime!

Only time will tell if our summers become more rainy in general due to climate change, but more extreme rainfall events are predicted for the Northeast (see http://downloads.climatescience.gov/sap/sap3-3/sap3-3-final-all.pdf). Is this summer a hint of what is to come? More rainfall will result in shifts in abundance or geographic ranges of plants and animals over time. So, will we have more slugs and fewer shrews? More water cress and fewer tomatoes? More umbrellas and less moisturizing cream? Just a thought. But in the meantime, I am searching Google Do It Yourself sites for "arks".

That damn Mike's Cigars

(I love to fondle my cigars before smoking.  Smokers' foreplay.)

I wish Mike's Cigars would stop sending me email specials about their products. About three times a week I get these enticing offers on samplers of cigars. Usually I can resist, because how many cigars do I need sitting in humidors at any one time? My inventory now is probably 200 cigars. But those sticks are not just for smoking. I love to open the lid of my special humidor containing cigars I have carefully aged at 70 degrees F and 70% humidity and just fondle them. I used to collect coins and stamps, but who wants to fondle stamps or coins?  But a collection of cigars has a special appeal, because you can admire the item in the short term, and then use it at some future date. They have such interesting and beautiful labels, which often become collector's items, and each cigar was carefully hand-rolled by some latino in the Dominican Republic, Honduras, Nicaragua, or some other tropical place.

Some day, Cuba will be truly open and their stash of top quality cigars will come flooding back into the U.S. I can hardly wait. I have to think that the U.S. cigar smoker was hurt much more than we ever hurt Cuba by placing an embargo on this product. Would we ever have placed this limitation on Cuba if they had been the world's only producer of zinc, or oranges, or computer chips? Of course not.

But cigar smoking is all about enjoyment. If I get all wrapped up in a political discussion about Cuban cigars, I get tense, and I drool more, and the tip of the cigar I am smoking gets all soggy. That ruins the smoke, because a wet head on a cigar then absorbs more of the chemicals in the tobacco resulting in an acrid flavor. I end up throwing the thing away at that point, and that makes me drool even more. Then the scotch is affected, and the result is dilution.  Therefore, avoid political discussions when smoking a cigar.

So I am studying Mike's email ad of today over and over again, because it is better than usual. To buy or not to buy? To delete or not to delete? The stock market is boring in August, so I have more time than normal to think. I never had time to fret like this when I worked at the university. Let me check that ad one more time.