Our house, built in two stages – early 1900’s and 1940’s – is accompanied by a large and well-established yard. It wasn’t until recently that I learned “lawns” and “landscaping” didn’t exist until the 1950’s when suburbs proliferated. Before then a yard was a garden – and our landlady’s grandmother was quite the gardener. Our landscaping consists mostly of scrap metal, salvaged fencing, cinder blocks and old advertising and real estate signs that she formed into a compost trough. At first I wanted to throw it all out but slowly and surely our landlady convinced me of their infinite value – and I have now even added my own salvaged garbage to assist in the gardening.
For the last two springs Jude and I have sifted compost from the trough through a homemade sifter into buckets – it has been quite the bonding process and now six weeks later Jude is enjoying the fruits of his labor… radish after radish… covered in compost – just like his little body…
Now if we could just conquer the crop of dandelions that is our lawn. Jarod was reading online for an organic method of extermination and the best he could come up with was “Eat them.” Any other thoughts?
P.S. I think that if any political candidate would promise to put an 80-year-old farm wife in charge of conservation and the national budget I would vote for that person on the spot. Last month Jarod’s grandma offered to eat a dead pigeon just to keep it from going to waste.
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