It was another happy and worry-free summer. I was a teenager then, spending the time off school at my grandparents’ cabin. I’d say, at least half of the population of St. Petersburg owns cabins or summerhouses, which we call dacha.
The government supplied lots and in many cases even houses to citizens back in days as benefits for loyal and excellent work. Dachas made life a bit easier since people could grow their own food at times of deficit. And a lot of kids spent holidays (especially summer school breaks which were over three months long) with their grandparents out of town, while their moms and dads came to visit on weekends. That’s how it was for me and for most of my friends.
Our cabin was in the village 2 1/2 hours away from the city (by train, there was no highway going that way then). It was a small and somewhat authentic little place. We had power, but to get water we had to pull a bucket out of the community well on the street. The village was lost in the middle of a big mixed forest which every summer treated us with mushrooms and berries.
That day I woke up to grandpa screaming, yelling and even swearing (which he did only in exceptional situations) while grandma was trying to shush him down.
“Can you believe it, she took it all! Didn’t even ask. Just stole it!” grandpa was irate.
“No, that’s not right! And that’s called neighbours? I’m going to get it back! Should have called the militia (Russian police then),” he kept going.
I was too curious to keep sleeping.
“What happened?” I asked.
“That witch, she stole my compost pile,” grandpa spit out. (I believe the neighbour turned into a witch since, while being a 70-year-old lady, she always wore bright lipstick and a hat with wide flaps when she was working in her garden, and in grandpa’s world only a witch could look like that and take something without asking).
Side note. We didn’t hold any animals, but there was one dairy cow on free range in the village. Grandpa always competed with my friend’s grandma for its manure that they used for compost piles. And due to this vital ingredient, the entire compost pile in my teenager’s world was pretty much equal to a pile of crap, the value of which I couldn’t understand yet.
So looking at my grandpa going nuts over a pile of you know what I couldn’t help it and started laughing. He turned around cursing the neighbour and left to recover his treasure.
Now, many years later I still remember that morning. It took grandpa over an hour to carry all his compost back, another day to build a fence around it and probably all summer to calm down after that outrageous incident. As before, he and grandma kept mixing their compost with water, leaving it to sit in the garden for a day or two, stinking all across the village, and then watering the entire garden with this "juice."
I had no clue about compost science then, but you should have seen that dirt. Black, rich, fine, shiny in the sun, oily and fruitful, it produced great yields and the flavours were unbelievable.
Many years later, my life path brought me into the world of agriculture and I ended up learning a lot about fertilizers and mixtures of all sorts used to improve the soil.
I recently listened to a presentation on glyphosate – the main ingredient of Round Up weed control chemical produced by former Monsanto (now Bayer) and widely used in agriculture. According to that presentation, Health Canada states that this chemical is non genotoxic and is unlikely to cause cancer provided that all instructions are followed.
It wasn't the first time I listened to a debate on chemicals and conventional versus organic farming. I heard stories from both camps, and all of them were convincing. Yet, the thing that kept popping up in most of them was the mentioning of thousands of court cases against the company producing glyphosate-containing products causing serious health issues.
I'm no expert in chemistry or agriculture. I'm not sure if it's safe to use chemicals on your dirt and which chemicals should be used, and I don't know the best way to go about farming or gardening. But I remember that dirt in grandparents' garden. And all they used was compost tea, all natural and fitting their particular garden's needs.
Now I have my own compost pile cooking to make my flowerbed look like that garden from childhood. And believe it or not, I would get really upset if somebody would try to steal this treasure.
