Less is more.

In an effort to avoid using farmyard manure because of the dubious qualities of some you can get, I religiously compost everything I can down at the allotment and also from the garden and kitchen.

When I say religiously, I don’t mean I say a prayer over the compost heap every Sunday morning, when I take stuff down. Though, I have been known to ask my maker to not let there be any rats under the old carpet covering, when I take it off.

No, I mean that every scrap of compostable material that we produce, including lawn cuttings, leaves, paper towels, cardboard and even blog bog roll tubes are diligently saved for the heap,

It all adds up to a very big pile at the end of a season, positively spilling over from my pallet bins, like some classical cornucopia of decaying matter.

But where does it all go, because when I come to use last year’s, the pile will have shrunk to next to nothing and I’m lucky if I get a couple of barrows full from it. Once again, at digging time, I’ll be left looking at those great steaming piles of manure belonging to my allotment neighbours, with green eyed envy and ever diminishing standards.

Whilst wheeling some of my precious material in the barrow the other day, I saw old Bob looking over the top of his manure pile.

“You want to get some of this stuff on it ”, he shouted over, casting a disparaging eye at my pitiful barrow load, “best cow s**t for miles”.

As he hadn’t actually seen me get the barrow load from the compost heap, and so didn’t know exactly what it was, I decided not to be out done.

“Ah but this is very special stuff ” I told him,

“Oh, what’s special about it then ?”, he asked.

“It’s from a bull and because it’s more concentrated you don’t need use as much”, I told him, with as straight a face as possible.

(Sorry about the picture quality, the camera was shaking for some reason)

For a fleeting moment I had him, then the penny dropped.

“What a load of Bulls**t”, he said, and ambled off to continue with his digging.