Slightly Unsightly

That's a cool phrase. You should say it. Slightly unslightly. Now try to say it ten times fast. Just kidding.

So, we have a lot of manure. That happens, when you have a horse. Over the summer, we would often go out, gather it up, and place it in a nice heaping mound in a designated area of the pasture. We fully intend to use it to start a garden. It may not actually happen next summer, what with all the other things we'll having going on, but at the very least we can set up our garden area, which we already have planned out. It'll be good. Stinky, but otherwise good.

In the meantime, we've had several holes that we've used the manure to fill in. Many of them have been in the pasture, so it didn't matter anyway. We'd pull out cement pilings, then fill the hole with manure. We pulled out a chicken coop, and underneat it the ground had been scratched and pecked away and created a dangerous slope toward the garage. No worries, we filled it with manure! It was a great system. We figured that it'll turn to dirt soon anyway, and this way the ground will be nice and fertile for the springtime.

Our driveway is very long. We could probably line four cars up end-to-end from the garage to the street. There is a driveway-sized piece of dirt running alongside the driveway. It used to have gravel on it, but the gravel has gotten churned into the dirt underneat until the dirt itself is hard, and gross, and holds water spectacularly well. Last spring, when we were moving in, we utilized the dirt area a lot. Our tires left ruts, which then hardened in the summer sun and, because of the gravel, kept the shape of the ruts. There were two holes that formed and we had so many other things we were thinking about that we just never bothered to worry about it, until last Saturday.

We figured that with the snow coming on, it would be a good idea to flatten out those holes before they're just big ice pits. So what did we do? Why, we filled them with manure, of course!

It really is a good idea, when all is said and done. I just didn't think about the fact that the manure is very much darker than the rest of the dirt in the area, or about the fact that you notice the smell more when it's not out in the pasture where it belongs. Nor did I consider that as the manure is turning to dirt in our driveway, it would be subject to the weather. It rained shortly after we filled in those holes, and the water that seeped out of them was a dark, mucky color. Eww. I mentioned to Hubby that it's slightly unsightly. He responded with the fact that the rest of our yard is also slightly unsightly, which, oddly, made me feel better.

Next year, we have big plans for the yard. It'll be good. In the meantime, I get a close-up view of how manure actually turns into dirt. Yay.