5000 pounds of manure costs 90 dollars

That's not necessarily something I thought I would ever know, but now I do.

On Saturday, we made the pumpkin patch a reality. There's a lot of pictures, so I'm putting them all on this flickr page. The photos are in chronological order starting at the bottom of the page, because I really can't figure out how to work flickr. Does anybody else have a site they like for posting photo albums or want to give me a flickr tutorial?

Needless to say, Saturday was a great day. In the morning, Andrew and I went down to St. Louis Composting with the trailer we rented from Ango Rentals and picked up 5 cubic yards of composted manure. It's a rich, black, steamy compost of straw and poop that's been allowed to forment for months and months.

Once we got back to the Danforth Center with the manure, we went and picked up a big ole' tiller from the Home Depot. Andrew and his dad Jim were there with me, and we just about killed ourselves. The patch was full of clay and rocks and it took us a while to get started. When we started out, the tiller had a terrible tendency to just sort of skip over the surface and take us with it. We had to get a lot of weight over the business end of the tiller, the tines, to get them to dig in. Once we broke ground, we just had to slowly work our way out from the center, until we'd gotten around the whole patch. Brian, who works in Dr. Beachy's lab at the Danforth Center, was helping and mostly, he and I went around and picked out the big rocks while Jim drove the tiller. Andrew had to take off early to go to his friend Jessica's wedding. Mom and Dad showed up and brought some much needed sandwiches.

Anyway, once the ground was all broken up, we pulled the trailer full of composted manure into the patch and spread it around, then tilled it in. That part was sorta gross. It definitely got very warm in the patch when we spread around all that hot manure. But by the end (around 8:00), it was worth it. We have a big patch of good loose, black earth, and it seems like a place where something might actually grow.

As I've noted before, it's going to be a great summer.