The Zoo-Poo Lady

I have always been a big fan of organic gardening. I prefer not to use fertilizers or pesticides if at all possible. Before I married the Engineer, I always kept a compost heap. The Engineer won't hear of it, though, he firmly considers compost heaps to be rat cafeterias and messy, messy, messy. Now that I'm married, I get my compost in cubic foot bags and remember my glory days of homemade compost with nostalgia.

Ah, for the olden days in Charlotte, NC, when I was known as the Zoo-Poo Lady.

Every year the circus came to town and every year when they left, they left behind industrial sized dumpsters loaded with pachyderm poop, liberally seasoned with zebra and horse apples and camel doo. The city got rid of it by inviting the public to dive on in and take home whatever they could carry. The "dive on in" part was quite literal. Close to a hundred people would show up with their pickup trucks, garbage cans, buckets, plastic bags, and mothers-in-law’s old Dodges and clamber into the steaming dumpsters, shovels flashing, to get their share of the black gold. The smell and the chaos were equally astonishing. I usually managed to emerge from the melee with my two garbage cans full and hauled them home in the hatchback. When I mixed that zoo poo in with the leaves and grass in the compost bin my heap really heated up! The neighborhood kids thought it was the funniest thing they'd ever heard of.

Somehow composted steer manure just ain't the same.