A Mountain of Love

In 1979 country music singer, Ronnie Milsap, recorded "Mountain of Love" which reached #2 on the Country charts.  As I was building my "mountain" shown in the photo below, this song was on my mind.  The mountain I constructed consisted of live oak leaves and grass that I had mowed in the yard and then raked up, put in a wagon and dumped right behind the wood chip mulch pile.  I'll let all this compost for a year or two since it has grass seed in it and I don't want to incorporate it into my garden.

The pile (or mountain) is six feet tall!  You can see the wagon that I use to gather the raked up leaves and grass and then dump on the pile.  I use a pitch fork to continue piling it higher and higher.  It took me several days to do, but I got it done.  Yes, there are easier and more efficient ways of doing this, but I only do this for the first mowing of the season, so it doesn't make sense to spend money for an attachment to the mower to bag all the clippings.  Every successive mow, I simply mulch the leaves and grass back into the lawn.

If I didn't rake up the leaves and grass cuttings after this first mow, it would leave a thick bed of leaves and hay that would crowd out and possibly kill the good St. Augustine grass below it.  Here is a photo of part of the yard after raking.  You can see the grass is unencumbered by any leaves or hay on top.

The reason the "Mountain of Love" song was in my head was a reminiscence of long ago when the kids were younger and still living at home.  I had an old John Deere lawn mower that I would use to cut the grass in the pasture.  I would rake the hay into piles and the boys would help me put it into the wagon that I had attached to the back of the mower.  In fact, the old wagon is still out by the barn.  We use it to put hay into to feed the cows.  Cows tend to waste a lot of hay if you just feed them on the ground.

The wagon has seen its better days.  The floor of the wagon has rusted out.  Tricia and I have talked about making a run to the dump to throw away.

Back to the story.  The boys would bring the wagon-loads of way and would dump it in our barn.  You see, when we built our barn, there was a gap beneath the tin on the bottom and ground level.  The photo below shows a 2x4 that is ground level.  Actually, there's about 5 inches of tin below that.  Between the tin and the ground was a gap that allowed cold winds in the winter to blow through as we milked.  When it rained hard, rainwater would flow into the barn.  Over time all that hay composted down and it became the floor to the barn, effectively raising ground level.   The animals only stay in the barn if the weather is bad, so we don't have to muck out the stalls and through the poop outside. 

Here's a cute photo of Agnes and her Baby girl, Penny.  Like in the previous photo, you can see another photo showing how ground level is about 5 inches higher than it originally was.

It took a lot of work and a lot of hay to be moved into the barn to accomplish this task.  Mountains of hay was brought in and spread out.  My boys did a lot of work!  They moved mountains of hay in our labor of love.