my garden experiment

Here is my little garden. I piled up the leaves from our maple tree last fall and left them to compost in their own time all winter where I had tried to have a garden last year. Late this winter, I started adding all our kitchen scraps to the compost pile, and have some lovely black gold, and lots and lots of worms. My idea was to let the worms do all the digging for me, make the soil good and fluffy, drag bits of compost underground... basically the laziest gardening method ever devised!! And it seems to be working marvelously. So what I did was rake the compost into the middle, and plant seeds around the edges where the leaf mulch got rid of all the grass and weeds for me (no weeding!). You can dig in the soil with your bare hands, and we have really hard red clay for a backyard without any topsoil to speak of (apparently this neighborhood was built upon the dirt TVA scooped up when they built the lake). You can't really see the sprouts coming up, believe me, there's lots growing in that little garden of mine!! I'm so excited about it, can you tell?

Here is our little friend the robin. He's a young robin, we watched him learn to fly earlier this spring. He always rested under our maple tree because it seems our yard is a bit too big for a baby bird to make it all the way across in one go. We made extra sure not to frighten him, and now he's nearly tame. He thinks my garden is a worm farm, made just for him. He especially likes it when I'm watering the plants or turning the compost pile. He will stand just the other side of the spray of water, watching me carefully as he flips through the leaves and eats his fill of yummy juicy worms! He also is fascinated by the clothesline, and will follow me around as I hang the wash out to dry, standing close enough that maybe I could catch him if I were so inclined. I reckon he knows I'm no threat. He keeps me company when the mosquitos force the girls inside. He has a sister that likes the compost pile too (or rather, the worms that are to be found in it) but he chases her off, and she just isn't quite as tame as our little robin friend. Seeing as how we've read The Secret Garden a dozen times now, we were thinking of him in the same lines as Ben Weatherstaff's robin, but Anam informs me that the robins in Europe aren't the same kind of bird at all. Well, he certainly shares the personality of the robin described in that book!