Landscaping with Manure Spreaders
Friends and relatives who live in metropolitan areas may ask, “What is a manure spreader?” The answer is pretty self-evident. Before chemical fertilizers, farmers cleaned their barns and chicken houses into a wagon with a chain-driven rotary fan on back scattering manure over fields and gardens. Rarely used today, this equipment is sometimes placed in a yard and filled with pots of flowering plants.
Our neighbors have one of these rural treasures which they decorate for the seasons. . .pumpkins at Halloween and Santa Claus at Christmas. Their little farmstead has horses and a variety of poultry. I wake to the joyous sound of roosters crowing. On sunny days, the chickens wander up through the thicket and scratch for bugs in the leaves in front of my house. A recent article in a contemporary gardening magazine suggested that chickens, raised as a hobby, are interesting garden ornaments. Free-range chickens do provide true country ambience.
Using what we find back in back of the barn has become a passion. The spidery silhouette of a horse drawn side-delivery hay rake on a hillside is a connection to the past. The antique walk-behind plow is converted into a mailbox post. An art form has developed from welded gears and broken machinery parts sculpted into animals and human figures. Now and then, you will see a skeletal metal man holding a mailbox at the end of a gravel drive near the road. We are partial, though, to green John Deere mailboxes. Many find it best to go low-key in mailbox décor, however, as jazzy designs attract teen-agers who cruise on Saturday night playing a game of bashing mailboxes with baseball bats.
We love rusted-out wheelbarrows, old washtubs on four legs, leaking tin coffee pots, abandoned hog troughs or aged tractor scoops packed with colorful bedding plants in the spring. Not the clipped green carpet of lawns in suburbia, we possess a distinctive regional style which is uniquely our own in rural America!
