Muck The Knife

The winter sun rises

What exactly is the Pilsdon Community? Well, its website suggests that it offers “a refuge to people in crisis... a community that shares a common life of prayer, hospitality and work.” This does actually seem to sum up rather well what generally goes on here. However it occurs to me that the whole set-up could just as well be viewed as a labour-intensive manure-processing facility. Since we keep feeding the cows, pigs, sheep, chickens and ducks, they keep on producing dung (not forgetting a few by-products such as milk, meat and eggs). And the dung has to go somewhere.

Twice a day throughout the winter, whilst the four dairy cows, three beef cattle and three calves are kept inside to prevent the wet fields from being damaged by their hoofs, the cowsheds are “mucked out”, i.e manure is scraped off the floor and forked off the top of their straw bedding (no, cows cannot be toilet-trained and enjoy sitting in their own faeces.) This produces between four and six wheelbarrowfuls of manure/straw combo a day which are wheeled some distance and tipped next to a huge manure pile which another person (sometimes me) later carefully layers on top of the heap and stamps around on top to squish it down to make more room.

The garden is a bit muddy

The pigs are also mucked out daily and the chicken and duck sheds are occasionally emptied. The five ewes are currently indoors and need mucking out regularly. The bull who we hired for seven weeks naturally produced a lot of bulls*** but has now thankfully departed. Not only all this but halfway through winter (scheduled for later today in fact) all the straw bedding from all the cows’ quarters is entirely removed and replaced, causing a massive peak in poo/straw-production.

The big pile behind the North Barn was completed when we emptied out the bull’s quarters so now all the poo is heading down to a concreted area at the bottom of the vegetable garden. Unfortunately this is also where last year’s manure is stored. This has meant a concerted effort to make space by removing the year-old manure and spreading it on the soil of the vegetable garden. Not a small task, and in fact is what three or four of us have been doing on and off for the last six weeks, to some effect. 

The North Barn heap - you can't help but admire it

The area we cleared during the Poo Party

However we needed one big push to make enough room for the forthcoming deluge of ordure, and so on Tuesday morning we hosted a Poo Party, invited all and sundry from the community to join in. About ten of us got to work, two at the manure heap, two wheeling the heaped barrows precariously along muddy wooden planks into the centre of the beds, two on the planks with forks evenly spreading it, one hurriedly harvesting carrots and radishes that were in the way, and the rest digging over the soil in preparation. The sun shone benignly on us all. Quality banter was at an all-time high. After two hours it was pretty much all done. The joys of communal manual labour on an important yet mucky project, followed by the eleven o’clock bell for coffee.