Part of my lawn and garden crew

There's an unused fence post in my back yard, relic of a former gate and fence that was there before we bought the place.

I left it in place, figuring I would use it someday.

And, sure enough, I do use it. I use it to hang my sprayer nozzle, which I bought on clearance at Lowe's for a little of nothing.

Moreover, I am not the only one who uses the post. A little fellow sits there and waits for bugs to fly by, I suppose.

I left him alone--aside from photographing him--and went and found a different nozzle to use for watering the plants.

If he's killing bugs, I figure he's an important part of my garden work.

Along with the possum that kills snakes--I hope--and the cats that kill mice--though not well.

The Ozarks Boy’s way to compost

First, dig a hole and put in your table scraps.

Serious gardeners compost their waste, according to what I hear, and if you go and search online it is true. Those people who compost are serious. They are willing to spend some serious cash, some serious time and some serious effort.

Now, The Ozarks Boy takes his garden and yard as seriously as he can, given his work schedule, family responsibilities and budget availability, which are heavy, multiple and low, respectively.

Consequently, the old boy has to compost quickly, easily, effortlessly and cheaply. He has a good way to build soil through composting, and he does it without spending much time, only a little effort and no money on a lot of expensive equipment like drums and tumblers.

He just digs two holes.

When he started composting a couple of years ago, The Ozarks Boy dug a hole about the diameter of

the length of his shovel handle and just shy of a foot deep. Into that hole, he threw a bunch of kitchen scraps—old leftover vegetables, peelings and rinds, empty corn cobs, lots of coffee grounds and paper filters from the coffee pot. He really guzzles the coffee.

Then dig another to cover it.Start filling the second
hole with garbage. When.it is full of garbage, dig
out the first hole again, covering the fresh garbage.
Then, start filling that "new" hole with garbage.

When that hole was about half full or so, he dug another hole the same size next to it and threw the dirt from that hole into the first hole on top of the kitchen scraps. He then used that new hole to dispose of new kitchen scraps. When it was about half full of vegetable waste, coffee grounds and the like, he dug out the first hole and threw the dirt into the second hole.

He did that all summer long, back and forth, back and forth. It wasn’t that difficult. There’s only The Ozarks Boy and the woman he lives with, his wife, who make kitchen scraps. So, he wasn’t out there throwing dirt back and forth every day, just every week or two or sometimes three.

In the late fall, early winter, he dug out one of the holes just a little deeper, piling the dirt into the other hole, and then used that hole all winter to dispose of the garbage. By spring, it was pretty full and ready to be covered up with dirt from the other hole.

That dirt had been sitting all winter and into spring, so most of it was ready to be used for seeds and young plants.

Well, there you go. That’s all there is to The Ozarks Boy’s Way to Compost. That’s pretty simple and easy, perfect for The Ozarks Boy who is kind of lazy. He’d rather sit on the front porch with the dogs and cats, drinking coffee and reading the paper, than get out and do much digging.

Time to start planning your spring, summer and fall gardens

With Christmas over and New Year's Day also past and out of the way, I'm ready to think about gardening.

Well, the truth is I didn't stop thinking about gardening, not even after clearing out my garden beds in the fall.

We've already been getting seed catalogs, so that works to keep me thinking about planting and harvesting, too.

The Ozarks Almanac has a Twitter account (feel free to follow), and one account we follow is Chickens on Camera. (@chickensoncam). That account led us to this page about mapping your summer garden.

That web page is a good starting point to plan your garden. I'd suggest you get a resource from your university extension regarding planting times and days until harvest. Figure out when your last frost date is typically, and you can figure out how to have two, maybe three gardens, a spring garden, summer garden and fall garden.

The Ozarks Almanac had a spring garden that provided us with a lot of fresh greens (see the picture above), followed by a summer garden of tomatoes, beans and a ton of squash and cucumbers.

It was fine, mighty fine eating. We are looking forward to more of the same this year.