Please Pass the Dressing!

In my profile I mentioned the series of books by Ralph Moody that I have enjoyed reading.  In The Fields of Home written and copyrighted in 1953 he recounts the time he spent living with his grandfather in Maine.  One item that has stuck with me was his grandfather’s way of speaking of various tasks.  When it came time to clean out the barn he spoke of spreading the “dressing” on the fields.  I have jokingly used that phrase myself.

Today I hauled and spread “dressing” on part of my garden and piled up some for Connie to put into her flower beds.  The local stockyard clean out their pens and aisles on Thursdays and gladly give away the “dressing” they pile out in the yard.  What isn’t given away they have to pay to have hauled away.  They gladly load it for you if they are available, although I have used a shovel and loaded my own loads a few times in the past.

The “dressing” is well mixed with sawdust that is used as bedding.  Here a bucket load is being taken from the big pile.

  The first bucketful is dumped into my little trailer.

With a trailer load of “dressing” I have arrived at home, ready to unload and beginning putting it onto the garden.

I shovel it into my trusty wheelbarrow and wheel it to the garden.

  You can see in this photo that I have dumped the wheelbarrow loads and it awaits being leveled out.

Now it awaits being rototilled into the soil, adding fertility and humus to the garden.  As there is rock not very far beneath the surface every bit of humus that we add helps with water retention.  And, I believe natural fertilizer is much better that the man-made chemicals that so much of the agricultural community uses.