Our friend Heather introduced us to the way that gardens are done these days. Even large scale farmers are doing this. It’s actually easier, so we’ll go with it for this year, anyway. So we won’t till next year, we’ll just put our compost on the rows we already established. We’ll put the shavings from the apple tree trimmings between our rows (either that or that’s where we’ll till to keep the weeds down). This way we’ll have walking paths and not be giving too many weeds our hard-earned manure.
The weather has been having fun with us lately. How nice and sunny! How it snowed last night! And rained the day before, and was really great for two days before that.
Work must go on, though. Today is the day we’d been dreading: cleaning day. Sure it happens all the time, but the drainage is sucking the wheelbarrow into the earth. Help, help!
Things are looking good. There are fewer runny noses and more sunlight. Let’s hear it for Spring! And we’re back on track to make the outdoors our own again.
We’ll miss the black gold the alpacas and llamas provided, but there is just as much manuer on the pile as there ever wa.
Just as we started pruning apple trees and moving manuer up to the garden, another snow storm came through! Then last night was about 20F. It might be hard to tell, but in the middle of this picture is an ice sculpture made by a broken water pipe. The crystals were lovely as they froze on tree branches.
As you can see, the composter 
does its job just fine. There is compost. There is environmentally friendly material coming out and cat poo going in.
We found a composter that can compost cat poo without any ill effects.