This Life Is in Your Hands_ One Dream, Sixty Acres, and a Family Undone - Melissa Coleman [21]
That fall, a call came that shook Papa’s foundations. As he was working in the garden after school, a student delivered an urgent message from Skates. Papa called his mother back from a school phone, hands still damp from the earth.
“Your father has passed on,” Skates said over a crackly line. “A stroke.”
Skipper had collapsed at age sixty-two while on a cruise in the Caribbean. Damn his bad diet and too much drink, was Papa’s first thought. Mama found him in the hunting lodge, tears in his eyes for the first time since they’d met, but unable to express the depth of his sadness. His father had left too easily, a gentleman to the end. As he washed the dirt from his hands, Papa swore to himself he’d live a fuller life to make up for his father’s short one. That meant staying healthy so an early death wouldn’t strike him and his own family. Looking down at his hands, he realized that they were his most valuable tool in this quest.
On that second spring at Greenwood Farm, Papa planned to grow three times as many crops as the previous summer in order to sell vegetables for income, but the acidic, sandy soil needed help. “This area is unsuitable for agriculture,” the Maine Soil Conservation Service report had stated in the first soil test.
“If you want to get me to do something, tell me it can’t be done,” Papa quipped, having seen firsthand in his Franconia garden that plants, like students, thrived with good nutrition and a supportive environment. That meant healthy soil and an enthusiastic gardener. He certainly had the enthusiasm, but what the soil needed was compost, and lots of it.
Papa was often out in his rubber boots with a pitchfork, the steam rising around him, as he turned the compost heaps to help the plant and food waste transform into “black gold,” as he called it. The Nearing-style heaps surrounded the gardens like six-by-six-foot log cabins, built from saplings that Papa cut and stripped with an ax. At first the log house was very short, just eight logs stacked in a square on top of each other with ends sticking out, but as the heap grew bigger over the summer and fall with leaves, grass clippings, pulled weeds, dry pea vines, lettuce gone to seed, and scraps from cooking and leftovers, more logs were added, up and up until it was as tall as Papa. “The compost pile is another mouth to feed,” he often said when adding dinner scraps to the bucket in the kitchen.
All the heaps needed were organic matter, air, water, and time—about six months—for everything to turn into black gold. If you were to stick a thermometer into the center, it might register temps upward of 150 degrees. Produced by the millions of tiny organisms that digested scraps into organic matter, the heat performed the secondary task of killing weed seeds that might germinate, unbidden, once the compost was spread in the garden. Earthworms also were key. Just as microorganisms consumed the organic matter, the earthworm in turn consumed the bacteria and microorganisms and left behind a condensed casting of nutrients. The only problem was, there wasn’t enough time or compost to fortify the amount of ground Papa needed to cover.
Fortunately, Papa knew about another soil-enriching secret farmers had used for centuries: manure from horses bedded on straw. Horses were instant compost-producing machines. Their stomachs digested straw and grain and broke down the enzymes in a way similar to the decomposition process of the compost heap. When horseshit landed in the stall and mixed with bedding straw, it continued to decompose to create a mixture that when tilled into the earth could bring to life even the poorest soil, but over the years the symbiotic relationship between horse and man had been lost to the benefits of the automobile.