Manure is a veggie grower’s best friend for sure but sometimes you really can have too much of the good stuff!

Our soil is fine, stony and very shallow so we’ve really made an effort to improve it.  Brilliantly when we bought the finca we inherited a huge pile of chicken manure.  Now some people have a problem with manure from poultry but really, so long as it isn’t fresh it is fantastic stuff.  In fact one of my heroes the late, great John Seymour, in his magnus opus, The Complete Book of Self Sufficiency, more than approves of it :Today though I’ve really had manure overload.  I had an ambitious plan to move an awful lot of muck, but forgot to ‘bagsy’ the good wheelbarrow.  D got busy moving logs with our ‘proper’ wheelbarrow (i.e. the one that works) and I got grumpy with the inherited, hateful wheelbarrow that was designed for really short people.  It’s great – I have to kind of bend my knees at all times and push my bum out to keep from banging into it whilst walking – I don’t know why but the handles are really really short.

After about 15 trips I’d carved myself a nice slippery path from the dung pile to the veg plots.  At about trip 20, I slipped – wellies really are not very grippy – sideways emptying half a barrow of muck and me into a heap on the floor under a very prickly bush.  At around trip 25 I really was wondering how convenient bags of artificial fertilisers might be – me being muddy, sweaty and partially covered in chicken poo.

At this point D came to give me a hand – i.e. show me how quickly he could move the muck in the proper manly wheelbarrow.  But as he fell, face first into his barrow of damp manure, pushing it up a plank to the top of my newly created chicken manure mountain, my mood improved.  When the handle of my decrepit barrow snapped off revealing a nasty, jagged post I really felt better.  Understand I would have loved to carry on shifting s**t from one terrace through an obstacle course of dogs, trees, mud and D but my barrow was well and truly broke!

Ah… I really enjoyed my hot shower and change into lovely muck free clothes while D finished moving the mountain on his own with the one barrow left.

Think it might be best to stick with just the one ‘manly’ barrow in future – maybe I’ll just stay in the kitchen and bake? I’ll remember to only move manure when its dry – what was I thinking we are in Spain it’s hardly every wet! Definitely picked the wrong time to be doing it!

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