Another Rural Sonnet

It's been a while since I've posted rural poetry. Lately we've been cleaning a lot.

A lot.

And let me tell you this place is dirty.

Really dirty.

But I'm sure that has nothing to do with why we don't get much company.   Nothing at all. 

Or why, perhaps, we don't invite people over very often.    Nothing at all. 

[Ahem]


Rural sonnet number whatever....


Ode to a Dirty House

Accumulated dirt from twenty years
And more, of living on a gravel road—
[A rolling cloud of dust likely appears
When every auto, bike, dog, cat or toad
Goes by when things dry out]—At any rate,
That dirt fills every pore of this old house.
It covers everything. Our real estate
Will soon be mostly in than out. I grouse
Each time I clean the tops of shelves unseen
For years. Each surface traps and glues right down
Vast swaths of gritty, grimy, anti-sheen.
The cobwebs make it worse because they’re brown
With gunk. I’d keep ahead of all that grime
But I’d be doing housework ALL the time.

Dead Tree Dirt

Yes, this is just a bucket of dirt. 

I ran out of potting soil to start my seeds in but I had read somewhere that dead hollow trees have great dirt at their bases and so Lily volunteered to go check out our hollow beech trees.   Sure enough, she found loads of this stuff, so she brought a bucketful back and we used it in our milk jugs.  

It's beautiful, isn't it.

Chicken Dirt

Aside from eggs, our chickens provide another valuable by product. 

Poo.

Someday I'll do a Poop Quiz all about it for you.

I know you can't wait.

All year long we dump our kitchen scraps and weeds in the chicken yard.   The chickens eat it, scratch it, dig through it and then poop all over it. 

The dirt in the chicken yard is the best dirt on this place.   All the scraps and weeds, etc build up and every spring we dig it down again and put the chicken dirt in our garden beds.

It's hard work, but it's rewarding because this stuff is like black gold in the garden.   Things shoot right up in it.

But, boy oh boy, it stinks.  Eau de merde de poulet is not my favorite scent.   

We'll cover it with some sand and toss it around and it'll be fine.   And the pumpkins will be thrilled.

[Those are our new strawberry beds at the top of the pic.   And you can barely see our new potato towers at the very top left corner.    More on those later....]