Oh how I wish I had taken my camera with me yesterday. But I goofed in our haste to get into the truck and get on the road so I'll have to paint you a mental picture instead. First I have to backtrack so you'll have some context for my little story. When the farmer, Mr. Walker, sold us the farm, he showed us a 9'x16' raised bed garden up near the house. He explained that he went to a mushroom farm and got some compost for the bed. Neighbors who have visited us since we bought the farm have regaled us with stories of the huge onions and great tomatoes Mr. Walker grew in that bed. I knew I had to get my hands on some of that mushroom compost for our new big gardens! Right?
Well, when Mr. Walker visited us a couple months ago, I asked him again about the mushroom compost and he told me where the place was and what highway it was on, sorta...... Needless to say, I Mapquested how to get there. A few weeks ago I called Monterey Mushroom and they put me on a wait list! Really? A wait list? That's how popular this place is during Spring planting season. Wow! It wasn't a week later that I got a call that we could come on April 22 between the hours of 8 and noon. Yippee!
Yesterday Joel and I hopped in his truck, each of us with our travel mugs filled with our favorite caffeine fix. He had hitched our largest trailer behind the truck and threw a huge tarp into the bed of the truck to cover the mulch so we wouldn't lose it all the way home. As I was driving I suddenly realized that Monterey Mushroom is south of Knoxville.........in the Eastern Time Zone, and we are an hour behind in the Central Time Zone. Oops! That meant that even though we left at 9am Central, we wouldn't get there until 11:30 Eastern.....with little time to spare before noon. Ummmm, I stepped on the gas pedal just a little bit as we made our way up and down and around mountains and plateaus and steep grades to get to I-75 South.
We made it by 11:30, checked in at the guard gate of a huge operation and the guard directed us toward the back of the mammoth property. Over a very muddy, rutted dirt road. At 10m.p.h. Throwing mud up onto the truck and trailer with each muddy water-filled pot hole. Of course it was raining all day yesterday for this outing of ours. We finally reached a line of dump trucks, cars towing trailers, and many pick up trucks with dump trailers behind them. And we waited and watched in fascination at the very efficient operation.
One man skillfully maneuvered a front end loader to an enormous steaming pile of compost off to the far left side of a football stadium sized area. Another man in a yellow slicker raincoat directed trucks into the right position for them to receive their portion of the black gold. It was fun to observe the different vehicles and the amount of compost they would ask to be loaded into them. Ahhh, just one big dump truck ahead of us and then it will be our turn. Finally the yellow slicker guy directed us into position and he came up to our window.
This is what he said to us with a big smile and a thick Southern accent. "We're going to dinner now. Don't let anyone park over there behind you." And he left. Yup! Just like that! He jumped into the cab of the front end loader with the driver and they took off for the main building down the hill. Ok, now. Joel and I just looked at each other and laughed! What are you going to do? We had driven thru fog down a treacherous mountain to get here and we were determined to wait it out. So, we opened the windows and shut off the truck engine and thought we'd just relax a while. Pee-you!
There were 2 huge retention ponds between the main buildings and where we were positioned waiting for the compost. One of them had really brown water and Joel supposed that was fertilizer. The other was a little better looking but they both were, shall we say, odiferous. I could hardly breathe.....seriously, I put my shirt over my nose so it would decrease the smell. And once it got into the truck it wouldn't go away. And we were stuck there for who knows how long?
Not half an hour later the guys showed back up and yellow slicker directed us to back up into position. Joel and I weren't going to miss this show and we both jumped out of the truck to watch. We hustled to lay our huge tarp in the bed of the trailer while the expert drove over to pick up a load of steaming fine grained mulch for us. He was so skilled with that loader. He watched the springs on our trailer as he gently sifted the mulch onto our trailer and stopped when he thought he had put the max amount our single axle trailer could handle. Then he went back for another, smaller load. He was so good that he was able to pre-load that front end loader on mostly one side. When he got back to us he gently dumped that side load into the bed of the truck, with only a few handfuls of mulch landing on Joel's back bumper. And just like that, he was done!
Yellow slicker pointed to an old red abandoned building up the sloppy, muddy pothole filled road and said there would be a shovel leaning up against the building that we could use. Joel drove us over there and we used the shovel to level the mulch in the bed of the truck so we could close the "lid" over the truck bed for the drive home. We brought the remaining long part of the tarp back to the tailgate and fastened it with bungy cords so it wouldn't flop all the way home. The rains washed away a lot of the mud as we made our way home and we pulled into our lane as the sun was starting to poke through the clouds.
Guess what we're doing today? Ummm, yeah. Spreading all that mulch over the 2 newly dug gardens. Oh, I forgot to tell you! Monday evening a man we never saw before just came driving up our lane with the same old tractor that had plowed our garden last month. He went right back to the big garden behind the barn and repeatedly worked the big chunks of earth until they were nice small pieces. When he finished the second garden we walked over to the tractor and I simply asked him, "Who are you?" He grinned and said he was Precious' uncle. Oooooooh, that would make sense. We chatted with him a while and then he tipped his big black hat at us and was off.
That's our life these days,
Debbie......loving every minute of it!
