down and DIRTY

there's something almost wonderful about getting as completely filthy dirty nasty sweaty grotty as i did today out in the yard.  it was way hotter than it was supposed to be, clearly "it" hadn't paid attention to the weather forecast.  and i spent most of the day taking apart the fallen crape myrtle with my iron age hand tools, no chainsaw massacre here, nuh uh.  loppers, prunings saws, clippers.  but once G finally came home from getting the toyota serviced and her hair cut and helped drag branches out to the curb things moved right along.  i'm keeping lengths of branches to try to make the kind of fence Jessica made for her garden.  i didn't see it in person, but she brought pictures when she came last month.  hers was dead branches as uprights, then coils of vine wound in between and live vines grown up the whole thing.  it looked fantastic, wild and secret, a kind of naturalized coyote fence.  maybe i can even convince her to come down and help me make one here around the vegetable garden. which may not stay vegetable garden much longer.  it's already got comfrey, chives of several sorts, sweet peas, monarda, day lilies, lemon balm (run completely amok), rudbekia, tansy, and goldenrod.  already more flower/herb garden than vegetable.  truth to tell, what it is is a weed garden right now.  so out of hand i just don't know how to cope with it.  if i weren't committedly organic i could nuke the living daylights out of it with weed killer. 

after we got the tree pretty much finished  (large chunks of trunk left to cut up on a cold day, nothing heats up the old somatic system like cutting up wood), some chunks for firewood, branches for fence, leafy parts out on the curb for the town chipper/shredder, we tackled the new compost bin.  this one is going in the garden itself, so first we cleared a space for it.  then we put it together. it was remarkably easy.  and man, is it huge.  i was daunted by it at first, but after we put: the raked up leaves that were blown down in the storm, a whole lot of bolted salad greens, half the contents of the old compost bin and miscellaneous other bits 'n shreds into it it looked just right.  it will hold a whole lot more yard waste than the old one and be a lot more accessible.  i shoveled compost out of the old bin into a trash can to dig in to the bed where i'm removing the bolted greens.