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[Clansgian AT wmconnect.com]

> >The next spring I spread it out a little (still 2' thick) and 
> plant winter squash on it. The squash doesn't seem to mind that it isn't 
> completely composted yet, but the weeds haven't found the pile, so it's 
> carefree gardening at it's best. 

One year a cart full of raw manure was parked near the garden just beside one 
of the orchards.  Part of it was from the rabbit cages and the rabbits had 
been fed some sliced up pumpkin in the winter.   Rabbits don't eat the seeds 
unless they are really hungry and these were never much hungry so a few of 
the 
seeds survived in the manure.

We were tardy empying the cart and had no pressing use for it so a pumpking 
vine sprouted out of it and rambled like something from a science fiction 
movie 
all over the orchard setting on basket ball sized pumpkins every few feet.  
If the fall a sharp dry spell deyhdrated the manure in the cart and the vine 
(which had set roots at nodes along its path) severed itself from the cart 
which 
we could then empty.  It was a great heap of field pumpkins from that one 
vine which the chickens and rabbits ate the next winter.


James