The much anticipated second ComposTumbler was delivered yesterday. Its arrival was announced by a merry musical knocking at the door by a cheerful delivery man. He kindly carried the heavy but strangely thin box back to the terrace for me, admired the little tumbler (he's a gardener, too), complimented us on our azaleas (he just planted a row at his new house), and then sped off on his next delivery.

Now, everyone repeat after me: some assembly required, some assembly required . . . about three and a half hours of assembly required in 90 degree F heat. At least that's how long it felt like with the afternoon sun pouring onto the terrace. The box proved to have all of the pieces for the tumbler, but this middle-sized model has a painted galvanized steel drum made in three pieces with plastic ends instead of having an all plastic barrel. It was too big to take it in the house as I wasn't sure I could get it back out again. I also noted that the person who designed this model must have had a PhD for the devilish use of nuts, bolts, and washers in many, many, many different varieties.

Nonetheless, encouraged by my success in assembling the little tumbler, I looked over the parts and the long booklet of instructions and resolutely gathered my tools. Our pear trees had been losing their leaves from being stressed by the hot, dry conditions and Mom had a man hired to come in and prune them sometime this week, so I needed to get the leaf piles out of the way of his crew. My family noted the arrival of the tumbler and then went elsewhere once Mom had the hoses turned on the pear trees trying to save their leaves and their ripening crop. The cats watched briefly before deciding that a new strange box had joined the group of unworthy boxes stealing attention away from them. That left me alone to sort out the hardware and wrestle the parts into a reasonably recognizable whole.

About three and a half hours and a request for Steve to buy some fast food for supper later, the new ComposTumbler stood in pristine glory on the other side of the terrace door from the dribbly baby tumbler. I took a short break to read the composting manual that came with this one and was somewhat chagrined to realize that the little tumbler had come with a Composting-For-Dummies manual compared to this serious treatise. Evidently, the little tumbler is for dabblers, but this model is meant for the semi-serious organic gardener. It went into the technical complexities of composting in considerably more detail than the first manual. I set aside the manual and the official composting thermometer that came with this tumbler so that one could check the feverish fervor of the composting, picked up my rake and leaf grabbers (they look like an orange plastic garbage can lid with teeth on one side to pick up "bites" of leaves), and went forth to load my leaf piles into the new tumbler.

I barely made a dent in my leaf piles before the tumbler was full, but there was still hope. After all, the material that went into the first tumbler had rapidly reduced in volume once moistened, and that proved to be the case here as well. I've topped off the tumbler several times and added more to the dribbly baby as well. The leaf piles are slowly being swallowed by the two of them, so there is hope of removing them from the necessary work area around the pear trees.

I also discovered something about the dribbly baby this morning as well. Among the many detailed instructions about compost making with a tumbler was a dire warning omitted in the first manual. It described a serious complication of composting in a tumbler whereby suitably fibrous material (like grass or shredded newspaper in long strips) caused the composting mix to roll up into balls. It even has a technical name: "balling up." The manual somberly intoned that the occurrence of large numbers of balls from one to three inches in diameter could seriously slow down the composting action as the material in the middle wouldn't get enough air and would not compost properly and smell foul.

Horrors! My dribbly baby was suffering from composting constipation! It was full of balls about four to six inches in diameter, looking like an elephant had been relieving itself in the tumbler. I took hoe in hand and started chopping up fibrous balls, giving the barrel a spin, and then chopping any new balls that surfaced. After fifteen minutes of diligent work, the contents of the tumbler had been reduced to material that actually looked a great deal like nearly-finished compost.

I went to report the averted crisis to my family. They collapsed into gales of laughter. "Composting constipation!" my brother kept crowing. Mom was laughing too hard to say much of anything except for a possibly prophetic comment about how we might need a third tumbler in the biggest size if I couldn't get all the leaves into these two. Obviously it is going to be up to me to deal with the digestive disturbances these tumblers might develop. I left them to their snickering with as much dignity as possible and went to collect some more material to top off the tumblers again. The new tumbler is already dribbling a bit so the composting is underway.