Today was the day to inspect the bigger tumbler's load. It had been cooling down for several days and was a nice, rich brown. Unfortunately, it was also quite fibrous as well. Even the bigger tumbler was going to have stringy stuff like the monkey grass mulched before it went into the tumbler if it was going to produce crumbly compost in fourteen days. Other than that, the load was a beautiful, earthy mass of garden manna, just what I needed to mulch the next section to be planted.

My vegetables planted in the old flower beds were doing quite well. I even had some melon plants growing in promising pluckiness, a far cry from what had happening in the unimproved yard area I had first coaxed Mom into surrendering to me several years ago. The cantaloupe vines had straggled about a foot or two long before making a few fruits about the size of a tennis ball. The watermelons had sulked even worse and produced one green knob about the size of a walnut that might remotely be called a watermelon. That disgrace was the best result I could wrest from the clay soil. I never was very good at growing watermelons, even though other gardeners have shared their secrets with me.

This year's melons, a few planted every few weeks for about six weeks now, were looking a lot stronger. One hardy watermelon vine had sprouted from the old seeds left over from that disastrous garden season and was already nearly a foot long and much stronger than those earlier vines. There was still time to plant the last of the cantaloupe seeds around the edge of a bed of snap peas and snap beans that I was going to sow. A nice layer of compost mulch over the bed would feed and help keep them moist in this heat.

Surely that hardy watermelon deserved some mulch to encourage it as well. I looked at the tomato patch, where the plants were growing into the nicest tomatoes I had ever grown. No question about it, they loved their compost mulch. I was onto something with it even if it didn't look like the magnificent compost in the pictures.

I looked at the contents of both tumblers and considered my options. I had apparently overloaded the baby with paper without enough green stuff, even with fertilizer added. It was developing constipation again, heating up briefly after each juicy batch of kitchen scraps and then pouting again. Apparently the microorganisms producing the compost were suffering from malnutrition.

The bigger tumbler was evidently through digesting the easy stuff and was stalling on the fiber. Its load had stopped shrinking and was pretty stable in volume. I decided to unload about half of it for the garden, fluff up the rest, and add part of the baby's paper to it. That would let the big tumbler gobble up more paper and maybe break down some more fiber. I also decided to add part of the still warm center from the bigger tumbler to the baby to reinforce its microorganisms with a vigorous batch. This organic version of Musical Chairs was worth trying, since the baby's original donation to the bigger tumbler had helped to get it started on digesting its load.

I put a cardboard tray beneath the opening of the bigger tumbler and carefully spun it down to ease the load to the doorway. The fibrous mass spilled over the edge like a raven-locked Rapunzel letting down her hair for a suitor. I took hoe in hand and coaxed a boxload out and dumped it on the new pea bed site. After about half a dozen trips, my hairy Rapunzel was shorn enough to look more like a chimp than a gorilla and I had enough compost out to mulch in some leaves and fresh weeds to make more compost mulch. I tipped my shaggy beauty back and started transferring paper from the baby.

I noted with chagrin that a lot of the paper was still dry. I had tried using less water to stop the messy dribbling and I had succeeded, apparently too well. I fluffed up the paper and moved it to the bigger tumbler, adding modest amounts of water from the plastic dish we leave out for the cats to each mound and spinning it in to moisten the remaining paper. It soon became clear that poking things apart with the hoe wasn't going to deal with this job satisfactorily. I threw caution to the winds and plunged my gloved hands into the mess and fluffed vigorously.

The baby's load began expanding alarmingly. I had taken handfuls of newspaper and other waste paper and torn it roughly into strips, and the layers weren't coming apart on their own. Once manually separated, they expanded greatly in volume and greedily soaked up water, gaining even more in bulk. The cats' dish wasn't going to do to moisten this thirsty mass. I got the garden hose and soaked with abandon, leaving the hose running on those beautiful tomatoes just outside after each drenching.

I fluffed, soaked, and moved paper strips as I became progressively more disheveled from the effort in the heat. My hair was no longer becomingly tucked behind me in a neat ponytail. It now wrapped itself around my face in sweat-dampened hanks. I began to feel like a scene from the Grapes of Wrath, maybe compost of wrath, paper of wrath -- well, there was definitely some wrath involved here somehow. But every time I put the hose back out in the garden on those lovely, strong tomato plants, I just couldn't give up on the compost. Despite the mess, this was working. Maybe with more practice, I would yet succeed in getting fast, crumbly compost.

In the meantime, the mulching mower did its magic in turning the fibrous compost, more leaves, and some weeds into compost mulch. I spread the compost mulch on the new bed, planted rows of peas and beans, and tucked the last cantaloupe seeds in holes around the edges. I gathered up some heaping handfuls of mulch for the older melon seedlings, promising them more if they perked up and did well. Time will tell if they respond as well as the tomatoes did.