Compost Giveaway Day

Oberlin's first compost giveaway of the year was held Saturday morning and I'm exhausted.  In four hours I shoveled about 12 yards of composted leaves and yard waste.  Loading is easily accomplished with the City's front-end loader but once back at the farm there is no easy way to unload the trailer.  It rained hard the day before and I hadn't considered how soft the field would be the next day.  Using Jim's little truck I pulled the first trailer full of compost out into the field but got stuck trying to back out.  I pulled the truck and trailer out with the Farmall and decided subsequent loads would only be taken out with the tractor and uncoupling the trailer from the truck in the driveway.  That worked for the next two loads except that I broke the hitch clean off the trailer trying to back it into the garden. Ooops.  Brent offered the use of a much larger trailer for the final load which took three times longer to unload with broadforks.  Jim continues to search for an affordable dump trailer which couldn't come soon enough.  Compost will be given away every two weeks throughout the summer so we'll have all the compost we can use but it'll take at least two weeks for my arms to recover from all that shoveling.