Gardening, Stage 2: The Big Poo Hunt

Garden dreaming.

In the last week, a whirlwind of joyous gardening has taken place. The university has cleared and tilled a large area for an expat garden (roughly a 140 x 30 feet rectangle about 75 steps up the mountain from our building). Here I must thank Professor Ka (psychology professor and international relations office administrator) for his garden advocacy ("why not thank him in person?" the astute reader might wonder. Well, because I still have trouble distinguishing among Korean men beyond "relatively short, dark hair, and glasses."  So I wouldn't know him if he came to the door. Or the garden.).

Anyway.  Wasting no time, interested ex-pats met to outline our goals and to design our first-year community garden.  We also noted some significant potential challenges to the site.  Namely: (a) it has no ready water source; (b) the soil is of questionable quality; (c) certain parties may be interested in the literal fruits of our labor (e.g., rats, deer) and/or a private little getaway spot for spring love (we are on a college campus, after all). Today's blog, however, is primarily about limitation (b). That would be Soil Quality, in case your mind wandered after the spring love comment.

So, the very next morning we paced out and marked paths and plots with pine branches and scavenged yarn and ribbon.  I made a spreadsheet to (sort of) show the garden's dimensions and to make this whole project seem more of a winning opportunity for those who'd not yet seen the garden.  Many expats, trusting the persuasive grids and colors of Excel, thereby chose their plots site unseen (grammarians: that's not a typo).

The careful reader will note that Lantingas have 2 sites.  Why?  Greedy buggers, you might think.  Perhaps.  But I want flowers and he wants veggies and ne'er the twain shall meet except over a well-maintained path between us.

Now on to the questionable soil.  My friend Google taught me all about do-it-yourself soil assessment, so we dug two representative holes, gathered representative soil from each, and put representative samples into separate jars that contained spaghetti sauce in their former lives (google recommended Mason jars, but I like to live on the edge.  Besides, I'm in Korea - who's got Mason jars?).  Next steps: fill jars with with water, shake vigorously, and wait 24 hours for the dust to settle.

My little piggies in the soil; photos from each end of the marked community garden; our soil assessment.

Apparently, good soil (which I now recognize is pretty much synonymous with "Iowa") is about 45% sand, 25% silt, 25% clay, and 5% organic matter.  Our sample was rather different: 90% sand, 7% silt, and 3% clay. Do you see any organic matter?  Neither did we.  Grade on this test?  F.

But, of course, there are other measures of soil quality, like a careful body count (insects, of course, not people - what were you thinking??).  Google said good earth should have about 5 earthworms per shovelful of soil, plus a decent assortment of ants, beetles, centi- and milli-pedes, etc. (sorry - Google refuses to tell me where we found that). So, happy to be guilt-free gardening at last (see previous blog), I turned over the soil in my garden (about 10 x 12'), and then in Nick's garden (same size) as well as raked all the paths around our two gardens.  I watched carefully for lifeforms as I pulled out roots (pine, wild roses, grasses) and clay clumps.  In that 4 hours, I found this result:
     0 earthworms
     1 ant
     1 small beetle
     Plus: 1 gnat, 1 housefly, and a tiny blue moth.
Grade on this soil test? Another F.

For my last soil quality test, I gripped and then unclenched a handful of soil to assess its "tilth": good soil should hold its shape but crumble when poked.  Mine completely refused to hold together, like a family reunion that has gone on far too long.  So, to summarize, the soil had failed the course. We could just as well garden at the beach, though there we'd have the advantage of seaweed compost complete with beachy bugs.

What to do?  Composting would create good organic matter, but that takes time (far longer than I'm willing to wait to get some darn flowers in the ground NOW).  We located some large bags of pig poo (possibly mixed with compost?) at a local nursery, but at 9,000 won (about $8.50) per bag, proper soil amendment would get pricey fast. And I like cheap, in case case you missed my earlier hints. So, we bought one bag of pig poo for each of our gardens, but I wanted more--for free, if possible.  I was willing to shovel.

Now, we knew of a horse corral directly down the hill/mountain from our building, and we'd hiked there through the piney woods before, but we'd never figured out how to drive there.  And I may be cheap, but I wasn't willing to carry shovels and bags of free poo up a mountain.

This morning, friend Tracey and I set out to find the poo source by car.  The corral is easily visible from the highway that runs past campus, but no one knew how to get there. So we took a secondary road that wanders past campus, near the highway and under it and back again. The first promising turn-off was a little lane that quickly ended in a small orchard. The next turn-off was a cement lane that ducked under the highway along some mucky rice fields before it, too, ended abruptly. The next turn-off (we were no longer sure which side of the highway we were on, and about here, Tracey--a 9-year resident of this place--said, "Have I mentioned that I have a poor sense of direction?") was a dirt two-track path rising steeply up a mountain.  Near the top, we eventually found a small orchard, large bundles of hay, and four huge silent-but-menacing guard dogs trotting around. (One dog was so large that from a distance Tracey though it might be a horse, and then we downsized it to a sheep as we approached).  As we parked behind a shiny white car, we saw an older man (I can't discern Korean age: he could have been 40 or 75) who seemed curious about the two middle-aged white women leaving their mini-van and walking toward him.

"An-nyong-ha-say-yo!" we greeted him in Korean, bowing our heads respectfully.  He walked away from us (was it something we said?) to chain up one of the horse-dogs, then returned.  We proudly knew the Korean word for "horse" and asked "mahl?" with helpless expressions. He did not understand. "Horse?" I tried. "Horses? Mawl? Mohl? Mool?"  Nope - nothing. Tracey bent to scratch out a drawing in the dusty track until our new farmer friend exclaimed, "Hore-suh!!" Yes!  (I was pretty impressed - I knew what Tracey was drawing and still couldn't make head nor tail out of it; I want Farmer Friend on my next Pictionary team).  He pointed over the mountain and gestured and spoke (in Korean, dear reader, not English - that would be way too easy) and after more drawings and a few common words like "highway" (ok, that was the only common word) and a couple of local place names, we thought we mostly had our directions.  "Ok," I recapped, "on highway; not Youngilman Port or Handong, but Namsong-ri."  He nodded.  But then he kept gesturing and adding something about Jong-Leong-ri, which is a small village several miles away.

Finally giving up on our stupidness, he finally gestured for us to follow him into the woods along a barely-discernible trail.  He stopped at one point, wrote 500 on the ground while saying "oh-bek meet-aw," and kept walking. Ah: 500 meters further.  Over his shoulder he asked "America?" and I skillfully responded "mee-gook salaam" (America person) and Tracey announced "ho-joo salaam" (Australian person).  He laughed, perhaps because he knew his family would never believe he led two unsuspecting foreign ladies into the woods. We arrived at the top of the mountain on the wrong side of the highway. And, as it happens, exactly across from us--only 1/2 mile as the magpie flies--was my campus apartment building.  Which I pointed out.  He again pantomimed and appeared to be saying we could just walk to the corral from our building instead of driving all over like crazy way-gooks (white people).  Well, yes. But we were in search of (free) poo, not just a friendly horseback ride, and we had no easy way to explain our poo mission (probably just as ludicrous in Korean as in English) so we just stuck with driving language (which, for me, consisted solely of the Korean word for "car").  So, with yet more smiling gestures and dusty drawings, we got the gist of his directions and returned back down the mountain. He pointed out some horse patties on the trail, noting that horses were apparently nearby, and I could neither contain nor explain my giggles.

He stopped to admire a blooming fruit tree (not apple, not orange, not pear, not pomegranate and then our Korean fruit words ran out).  He mentioned "moon!" and "night!" and made exploding sounds and gestures toward the tree.  Finally we understood: these white flowers appeared to glow under the moon's soft light.  I realize that most of you are concerned about our sanity in following a strange man through the woods, but I dearly loved seeing his blossoming joy.

Back to the poo pursuit.  We found our way to the highway, exited at Namsong-ri, drove a few kilometers to the next u-turn lane (now THAT is a standard road feature the US should adopt) and easily found the horse stable!  Oh, wait; this was not the one we were looking for.  Well, we're here, so why not?  We found a man and Tracey tried to request "mahl" and "tawng" (what we believed to be the Korean word for "poop"). He did not understand.  We got a shovel and gloves from the van and pointed to the barn.  Aha!  He got another shovel and two large bags, then helped us shovel the old poo and even carried the bags to the van.  While asking about rates for riding the horses (a one-hour "lesson" is about $28 and something else - perhaps a set of lessons? is about $300), I noticed that the nearby horses refused to meet our gaze, rather like unprepared students who desperately wish to avoid being called on.  With two bags full, we could have returned home, but we still hadn't found "our" corral and the day was yet young.

We continued on our way and found another tiny village with its requisite dead-end lanes and rice tractors, but then we noticed a cow barn (picture a large shed or warehouse, not a picturesque red wood barn).  And cow barns have cows and cows make poo, too.  Well, why not, Tracey said; we're here already.  So, out we hopped and after admiring some calves and a lot of brown bulls (steers?  I didn't check closely) standing knee-deep in fresh poo, we found an ajumma pitching hay into the mangers.  Tracey was our designated speaker, asking this time about "so" (cow) "tawng" (poo??) while pointing to the boy-bulls' messy milieu.  The ajumma understood (hooray!  no drawings in bullcrap), then gave us shovels and four large bags and pointed out some relatively dry poo on the floor. She then left us to it.

A few shovelfuls into the job, it struck us that a radio was playing in the barn.  And, the song was in English.  Tracey recognized the singer first: Doris Day. Once I started giggling, it was hard to stop and it was nigh impossible to shovel poo.  Here we stood - middle-aged American and Australian women in a nameless village in rural Korea shoveling some lady's cow poo while listening to American big band music popular when our parents were young.

We never did find "our" horse corral.  But the poo adventure was itself worthy of the pursuit.  We surely helped create stories for some Korean dinner tables tonight, and our gardens, covered now in dark, organic clumps, shall thank us for a long time to come.