Member profile for Slate prairie paradise

The only hitch in all this bliss is finding a steady, affordable supply of mulch and compost. I make my own compost, mostly from leaves (no grass clippings, they stay in the lawn). It always seems a paltry amount until I recall that Helen and Scott Nearing grew all their food in a fairly small garden that they maintained in high health with only half an inch or less of compost every year. The stuff is magically potent. You start off with a big, airy volume of leaves and end up with a small, dense volume of compost that you can think of as digested leaves enriched with microorganisms and volumes of their waste.

One last note about mighty compost and living soil digesting mulch. Having moved many times, I've gardened on very different soils--clay in Missouri so dense that water barely moved into it, sandy soil in Connecticut left by the glaciers, prairie loam in Iowa--and all of them became more hospitable to my plants after the first year of mulch and compost. The extension agent in West Palm Beach, Gene Joyner, grew a tropical jungle of fruit and nut trees on pure Florida sand by mulching every year with a foot or more of shredded trees branches delivered by friendly crews cutting trees for the local electric company. A foot or more sounds like a lot to most folks, but in a warm year-round climate even sandy ground digests every bit of it in twelve months.

Sorry to hear about the hens lost to predators. My neighbor in Missouri kept chickens that roamed free and roosted in a coop at night. I fed them (she was a weekender). One day I found abandoned puppies in a roadside ditch and brought them home. About two weeks later they wandered next door (meaning a quarter-mile, found the coop and wantonly killed all the chickens). They came home, looking as innocent as puppies and I left to feed the chickens What a shock to find all them dead in the barn. I had no idea that puppies would turn into predators at first sight of chickens.

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