Edible Schoolyards and Chicken Manure

As my plants seem to slow down and my body tries to hunker down as fall comes to the Ohio Valley, school and the people around me demand lightspeed movement. The contradiction has placed me on my couch under a blanket typing e-mails. Compromise.

On Sunday I returned from an inspirational trip to southern California where I discovered a story and a rant:
Story: Arriving in the dark at Rancho Cucamunga, I was pleasantly surprised when I woke at 6 to the beginnings of dawn and drank a pot of coffee as the sun rose and lit up Mt. Baldy behind me. The sunrise in the desert is always the best because even people can't mess up the feeling of morning in the dry and stark landscape. After trying to wake up my brother by busting in his room, I started my second pot in the sun while he unlocked, shook his head and joined me in the day. I was not sure what anything else looked like besides the mountains outside my brother's backyard since it is walled in with 7 foot concrete block walls and the whir of his sprinkler system blocked out any of the natural sounds that would indicate anything that belonged.
Our adventure began and my story climaxed as we drove out of his neighborhood in his gray Prius. Viewing the world though a cracked windshield, my brother pointed to a lone aged house tucked between the McMansion developments he had helped sell. In the front yard an old hunched man, resembling the worn look of his home, slowly made circles under an orange tree while, who I assumed was his wife, performed a similar ritual under the adjacent tree. Brian, my brother, explained how the man and woman had lived at the house an eternity, which in SoCal time is more than three years, and each year they tend their double lot of citrus trees and sell them to the residents in the developments as they begin and end their commute into LA.
I was amazed at this situation. This ancient married couple managed to find a life close to the soil, creating a home together and a creating functional market in their yard while the people who bought their fruits drove into traffic or out of traffic in their cyclical grind of life. Isn't the life of these old people based in companionship, wholeness, hard work and home what the commuters are searching for in the sea of traffic?

Rant: Will have to wait till next time.

Update:

Since my last post the fall/winter transition continued. I tore out the dried bean vines in the former potato patch, composting the vines and saving the beans for planting next year. Working around the kale and mustards that grew along the edge, I used a leaf rake to pull the old straw mulch from the top of bed, broke the bed to a depth of 6 inches by using a potato fork (thick pitchfork), and hoed the top two inches into three raised rows. In between the rows I placed four 20 gallon tubs of chicken manure enriched compost from my coop and broke up the clumps. In these compost gullies I broadcasted a mixture of hulless oat seed and radish seed in hopes for the oats to penetrate deeply into the bed and provide conduits for future root and for the radishes to feed my rabbits a last bit of green before the winter. In the three raised rows of the prime topsoil of the bed, I plan to plant a pound of garlic cloves as fall progresses. I ordered 8 ounces of Susanville and Music garlic and plan to plant 8 cloves of each every weekend for the next two months starting at the southside of the bed. The desired result of this planting is to find the prime time to plant garlic in the fall for the area. After having the first 16 cloves in, I covered the row with six inches of straw to insulate from the winter cold.

The cabbage and brussel sprouts continue to blast along in the top bed. Three early dustings of Dipel, an organic fungal insecticide, seemed to knock out the cabbage worms which slow the growth of many seedlings. I look forward to these cabbages after pulling out two gallons of ruined cabbage that should have been beautiful sauerkraut, one a which should have been a red wine kraut. The problem with the two ruined gallons was a low salt content which lead to hastened rotting and sliminess. On the upside, the gallon that turned out used jalapenos harvested on the property.

Today was a massive gain in momentum for the edible schoolyard at my school. It is encouraging to receive the support and more plans will be described as the parameters are set.