I don’t like mowing a yard, especially when the yard is on a farm.  It irritates me to push a noisy piece of machinery over a piece of land that yields no food for me or the others living here.  The roaming rooster and guineas glean a little here and there, but there really are not impressed with the selection at this particular salad bar.  A yard is great for a picnic, but I would prefer a pasture for a picnic any day.

I am vowing that this coming year the mowing will be minimized.  Going in are perennial beds, hugelkultur mounds, insectory plants by the hundreds and a kitchen garden for fun.  The front yard outside of mine and Kristin’s door is the first to fall.  Step one is to kill the grass or otherwise remove it. Well, actually step one is to figure out where the beds will go and do some measuring and flagging.

A few years ago I attended a workshop at the annual CFSA conference presented by Susana from Salamander Springs Farm. The workshop was all about building no-till beds on top of grass.  I finally found the notes in one of the piles of notebooks that I have only recently brought together into one pile.  The notes spell out a no-till “Layer Cake” garden bed recipe:

Step one – “The Plate” consists of large sheets of cardboard laid over existing pasture or lawn.

Step two – “The Cake” consists of several inches of manure or compost.

Step three – “The Frosting” consists of mulch such as leaves, old hay, shredded paper and straw.

Step four – “The Baking” consists of letting it all settle and rot for three to four months.

Step five – “The Eating” consists of pulling the mulch back to put in plants and replenishing the mulch as the plants grow.

For our cardboard needs we almost always head to Siler City.  The dollar stores’ Dumpsters are usually a nice jackpot for all sizes of box, not necessarily a requirement to fit most mulching needs.  For larger jobs we would hit furniture and appliance stores.  The boxes are bigger and thicker providing more grass and weed killing power.  For uniformity of boxes, the local ABC Liquor store would be perfect.  Most folks hit them up for packing boxes.  For wax boxes, hit the grocery… Since this particular project was just a piece of a front yard, the dollar store cardboard works well.  The only problem is the tape.  There is a lot of tape to remove and dispose of.

While peeling off tape, you get to see where all the crap products come from and come through.  Most of the importers seem to be in New York City of New Jersey.  The origins are India, China, Korea, Vietnam.  None of the boxes were made from recycled material (no notices on the boxes), so I will probably be mulching with cardboard descended directly from trees, most likely trees from Canada.  That is a long way to go in order to get into my front yard.  The boxes also have loads of staples, fabric tape and heavy duty packing tape holding everything together.

The value of the boxes and its associated connectors is probably higher than the value of the stuff inside the box. I know the value of what I am about to grow on and through those boxes is higher than the box plus the stuff inside.  And then some – mostly because so much comes from the cardboard.  Earthworms tunnel under and through it; pill bugs, beetles and earwigs make their home in the crevices between the layers; fungal mycelia run like branching rivers throughout the whole bit.  All of this activity leads to the decomposition of the still useful organic matter and carbon that is nestled within the cardboard.

What would have taken years to happen with the use of a new log, the loggers, grinders, pulpers, pressers, importers and exporters have made into a readily available haven for all sorts of micro and macro interactions. But the folks at the end of the box-chain would have just thrown it away or possibly recycled it into more cardboard that would eventually be thrown away (nothing against recycling cardboard) whereas we at Circle Acres have really recycled the box and returned it to its rightful place – rotting on the ground and being digested by those who can do such a thing.

The only drawback to this system is that it takes a really long time to build.  For one person, by hand, estimate at least two hours to go twenty five feet.  Then of course there is the “baking” part, but after three or four months the area should be grass and weed free.  It will also be a nutritious place to start off new Spring plants for Summer harvest.

I grew up knowing that November meant there would be a deer hanging somewhere in the front yard, probably by the antlers or the neck and probably from the branch of a tree.  Or maybe hanging out of the bed of the pickup truck.  Or from a rafter in the dirt floor garage.

I knew that the stories of how that big buck came to be dead would be floating around the house until they could be recited, with all the groan inducing embellishments, by people in the house who were trying hard not to listen.  I could probably dig deep enough to remember one or two of those stories, but who gives a shit really?

My grandfather also told stories, the ones that I have forgotten, the ones about how the deer tricked him or showed him up or maybe never even existed.  He never seemed to be about the perceived glory of shooting something in the face; when a deer was in the freezer before December he seemed satisfied with the knowledge that, with the deer’s help, he and his family would have food for the Winter.  He didn’t regale in the winners and losers of what most sane people would see as a wholly lopsided conflict heavily subsidized by civilization and its tools – a heavily armed human against an unprepared, unwilling and unaware opponent.

My grandfather’s task was brutal regardless, but maybe less so as there were no mounted heads on the walls of his home like there were in our home. The need for those stuffed and preserved reminders is something that I couldn’t explain back then, but know now is an indication of small mindedness, a dedication to the outward projection of dominance when you know that you are inescapably weak inside.  You are a collector with no sense of how to interact with the dead or the living, both phases of life simply reminders of inadequacy, weak interpersonal skills and low self esteem. If you have a deer head or a stuffed fish on your wall, go look at it and ask yourself what reminder it serves that could not otherwise be captured by a photograph or poem. Is it there to show your friends and family what a hero you are?

When I was younger, I volunteered twice to travel with a New York DEC deer ager on their rounds.  For fourteen hours we visited deer processing places as well as any house that had a deer hanging in the front yard.  My job was to write while the ager examined teeth and called out the ages of each dead deer.

I think it was during this time that I became permanently desensitized to the sights and smells of dead non-human animals.  At each processor were dozens of barrels and drums and tarps full of various parts; piles of legs next to buckets of guts and tails; lines of deer carcasses waiting to be disassembled by hacksaws, band saws and reciprocating saws, mostly frozen in rigor mortis or by the depth of cold in the evening air.  Steam escaped from some of the recent arrivals, a sign that they were less than an hour dead.

*****

There can be nothing more brutal or common or necessary than taking a life in order to eat and sustain a body. Non-human animals do it without question, without any perceptible remorse or hesitation. What makes our actions so much different?

We pull carrots from the soil, ending their run from gravity, ending their gathering of sugar and all the processes that made them a living thing. They may not scream or run or struggle much, but a carrot is a living thing nonetheless and we must kill it in order to eat it.

Eating a carrot is nothing like eating an animal, which is why many choose not to eat the latter at all. I respect that choice; it was a choice that I had once made as well. As with eating it, killing a carrot is nothing like killing an animal. Animals articulate their disappointment in our choice to kill them in blood gurgles, screams and the twitches of ending nerve impulses. We destroy them in order that we can live; we destroy them for other reasons as well, reasons that have no bearing on survival. If you do not believe that then you deny that your meal had any previous life beyond its packaging. I apologize, but I can’t let you do that.