Shoveling manure
We gathered another load of manure Tuesday afternoon. Last winter
at this time, our pickup truck was working and we hauled manure in the
truck and on a trailer behind the truck. I shovelled a lot of
that manure four times --- into the pickup, out of the pickup into a
heap on the ground, into a wheelbarrow, and then from barrow to
bed.
Phew!
This year,
without a pickup truck, we're instead shovelling manure into five
gallon buckets. Given our ultra-fuel-efficient car and the one
mile drive from farm to farm (8 cents per round trip), this method
actually seems to work better. We only shovel the manure once,
into the buckets. After that, we can lift the buckets into the
golf cart, and then pour them individually onto our garden beds.
But an even better way is on the horizon --- we ran into another
neighbor who told us that if we help him shovel out his barn he'll
drive a whole flatbed dump truck load to our garden. If Mark had
a more envious disposition, he would have been jealous at the lust
which leapt into my eyes....
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About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.
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