Economic Hardships
The economy is hurting and many people are feeling the pinch. I work for the school district and my wife works in an industry heavily dependent upon public funding. My own job seems to be fairly secure (I do have a “job review” upcoming) as does my wife’s. But due to the dependency upon public funding she is waiting for the other shoe to drop. Her employer already took the step to completely eliminate overtime. They went in on a Monday and cut every extra shift that people were working and gave it to a salaried employee.
It hasn’t been discussed that I know of, but the school district could do like they do elsewhere around the state and outsource the busing department – or tell kids they have to find their own way to school. I just keep doing my job and believe that I do it well enough to keep it.
With all of this turmoil we decided to go in with another couple and start a sort of community garden. We’ve spent the last month trying to get a jump start on the garden rows. If we had started last fall we would have done these steps a little differently but now that it’s almost spring we’ve really had to get the jump on making the beds. I’m unofficially the garden expert of the group. I have a copy of an organic gardening book and some time to read and research.
I ran down the location of free mulch here in town and a willing horse lodging place for all the free manure that we can possibly haul. J has access to a trailer and a work truck so the first weekend our mission was to grab a load of mulch, dig a big hole and then haul a trailer full of manure. We are using fresh manure so it has to be dug in really deep to prevent burning. We drove out the the public works yard where the mulch is free for the taking 24/7 as long as there is a pile there. I made S go with us to dig and shovel the mulch. It was packed down and took a bit of time to get a trailer full of it. Then we drove back to the house to unload it. Mulch really is what we wanted last, so we just piled it off to the side out of the way. We then started digging the first row. I didn’t realize how difficult it was going to be, we were digging down between 12″ and 18″. The layer of fresh manure is supposed to be the poor-man’s heated row. It adds a little bottom heat and warms the soil higher than just sun light. The row ended up being 4′ x 18′ and we dug down around 18″. The soil was actually fairly deep which surprised me due to the volcanic cinders covering the entire town and where it didn’t blow out of the stacks of our dormant volcanic beasts it was laid down by builders to level the ground.
This row ended up being a little short because the far end ended up being rocky. Rocks from two inches to a foot across really slowed down the end of the row. We also ended up putting some wire caging down to protect what appeared to be a cable tv line that ran too close to the surface. Once we had the trench dug down we filled it from the trailer with 6″ of fresh manure and then put the pile of dirt back into the hole and finished by leveling it out. It took all of this first Sunday from around 10:00am until dark to accomplish this first row.
Next up: Everyone has advice.
