It’s time to spread some manure on the garden and pumpkin ground.  I try to do that every two years.  So today I spent time getting my trailer tail lights to correctly indicate a left turn, a right turn as well as indicating to anyone behind me that I’m preparing to stop.  Once I’ve accomplished that I will be ready to venture onto the highway and go get a load of sheep manure to enrich the garden soil.

My mechanical skills are somewhat lacking as well as my patience for doing mechanical things so it was quite an accomplishment that I achieved my goal; working tail lights.  I had to invest $10 in a spray can of electrical cleaner thinking that would solve the problem of no lights on my two- wheeled trailer.  The real problem turned out to be a poor connection on the ground wire and once I scraped the rusted trailer hitch clean and exposed shiny metal the turning signals and brake lights worked fine.  Would anyone be interested in buying a slightly used can of electrical cleaner? 🙂

Now back to the topic at hand, manure.  I don’t think there is any topic in the English language that has more words that can be used to describe it.  Instead of calling it ‘manure’ I could have referred to it as poop, scat, crap, waste, do-do, feces, bowl movement material, droppings, excrements, stools, and the most socially unacceptable word, shi_!  As you see I find it so unacceptable that I can’t even finish typing the word on my blog.  However, if you are not sure what the word is go to Facebook and read comments under some of the political posts and I guarantee you will run across the word a time or two! 🙂

It seems manure has been a big part of my life and I was thinking about that today as I repaired the turning lights on my trailer.  You see I grew up on a farm that raised chickens, sheep, ducks, cows and pigs so there was great opportunity to become familiar with manure.

The gutter in the milking barn comes to mind.  For you non-cow milking folks a gutter is a trough behind the stalls the cows are standing in.  When they go to the bathroom, which in cow life happens quite frequently, the waste falls into the gutter.  Each day the gutter must be cleaned out with pitchforks.  The manure is either piled next to the barn or thrown in a manure spreader and spread on a field for fertilizer.  Those were dangerous times.  Three brothers each armed with a pitchfork throwing globs of manure out the barn door was a recipe for disaster.  No serious injures such as puncture wounds or loss of an eye ever occurred however.  A misfired chunk of manure to the face would occur occasionally which would result in a verbal confrontation and would often require our father to step in and mediate the situation.

Several times a year the chicken house which contained the laying hens would have to be cleaned.  Gas masks would have been suitable had we had any available.  The ammonia gas in the chicken manure was so strong that sinuses were blown free of any debris within seconds.

Of course there was sheep manure to contend with and pig manure too.  So to say my life got off to a ‘crappy’ start would be putting it mildly. 🙂

But then I went to college and I thought I had left my manure experiences behind me.  And I did for five years.  I know, I know college is supposed to only take four years but that’s another story for a different blog.

I finally graduated with a biology and teaching degree.  So I began teaching biology and continued in that profession for thirty-four years.  I know what you’re thinking.  Finally no manure.  But you would be wrong.

Remember I was teaching biology, the study of life.  How can you study life if you don’t have any living things in the classroom?  So I set up an aquarium with fish that usually went bad right around Christmas break.  That smell competed with the manure smell very well.  And of course I had a couple of gerbils and a couple of rabbits.  In fact I trained the rabbits to go to the bathroom in a pie pan in the corner of their cage.  Then there was the garter snakes, the painted turtle, a couple baby snapping turtles, a skink,  and a couple of white rats.

Probably the record breaking manure year of my teaching career occurred when I agreed to keep a monkey and a noisy(and I mean noisy) parrot that spent their summers at Ike’s Chicken Shack a well known eating place on Lake Traverse.  The monkey’s name was Ralph and Ralph had the habit of throwing its feces out of his cage when it got upset.  When I would show a movie Ralph saw the animal life on the screen and got upset.  And then I got upset when I had to clean up after Ralph!  The parrot did nothing but squawk and go to the bathroom.  Those two visitors ended their school year early as on April Fools night the school caught on fire and at 2:00 am I and the fireman rescued all the animals.  But Ralph and the parrot never returned.  They were banished back to the Chicken Shack never to grace the halls of Wheaton High School again!

There was one other extremely foul (actually foul and fowl to be exact) year that I recall during my teaching career.  I did my grad school work at the University of Oklahoma  and  during one of the summer sessions our class did a project that I fell in love with and knew I had to do that same experiment with my biology students back home.  The experiment consisted of applying various amounts of the hormone testosterone to newly hatched male chicks and recording the effects.  There was a control group of course that did not receive the testosterone.  Each group had around five chicks in them and the little chicks were housed in big cardboard boxes.  So five big boxes were jammed in the biology room and the experiment lasted for a month.   As the weeks went by the smell of chicken waste was constant and feed dust settled everywhere.  The chicks receiving the largest doses of testosterone began attempting to crow.  So the room was filled with the constant sounds of mini-roosters emitting very immature crowing sounds.  You can see where this is heading can’t you?  We never repeated that project again!

Once the experiment was complete I was stuck with twenty-five growing, crowing little chickens.  Luckily the school janitor who lived on a farm and had a family to feed agreed to take the little birds and raise them.  I talked to him years later and he said they butchered them, ate them and they tasted just fine.  I just hope our testosterone experiment didn’t cause gender confusion for the poor little fowl as they matured!

I left the animal waste behind when I retired from teaching in 2001.  Perhaps now I would free myself of that burden that had been with me since childhood.  Wishful thinking!  The Bonanza Education Center is a beautiful naturalist building located in the Big Stone Lake State Park.  I was asked to become the director of the facility in 2004.  My job would consist of meeting elementary classes at Bonanza and lead them in a day of outdoor learning.  Now I dealt with a new version of manure.  It was called scat.  On our hikes I and the students identified raccoon scat, coyote scat, mouse scat, pheasant scat, mink scat, deer scat and on and on and on!

You have to get very close up and personal with scat.  We would get our noses down very close and using a twig break the scat up and see if there was any evidence pointing to what the animal had been eating.  Raccoon scat is often filled with seeds from the various fruits it consumes.  Fox and coyote scat is filled with hair from the rodents that they feed on.

I was a scat chaser at Bonanza for eight enjoyable years and then I retired again.  So now I have left my manure experiences behind you say?  I mentioned at the beginning of this blog that I have become a gardener and pumpkin farmer and every two years what do you suppose I need to add to the pumpkin ground?  Yep, I hate to be redundant but …..manure!  And as I began this blog I shared how I was preparing to get a load of manure.  Spring is here and if the soil is going to produce healthy pumpkins nutrient filled manure is needed.  So life goes on unchanged it seems.

I can’t seem to shake this need for manure in my life.  Perhaps on my tombstone they will inscribe “His life was a waste”.  That would be very ‘crappy’ of them if they did that!  🙂  On those two very sick attempts at humor I will end my blog.  🙂

Until next time.