After nearly two months from the arrival of the dribbly baby tumbler, I was getting impatient to get my first load of finished compost. The baby was still cradling its load with the bloated look of decided constipation. The material was nice and brown like compost should be, but it was still too wet and fibrous. I decided that more fervent persuasion was needed.

So, last week I set aside a day to devote my attention to helping the baby with its compost balls. I started early in the morning with a thorough session of spinning the load and chopping balls until no more of them surfaced. Then I left the door open to let some moisture bake out. The afternoon temperature was predicted to top 90 degrees F, which would help both the composting and the drying of the material.

If I could get it loosened up enough, perhaps I could spread it as mulch and let it finish breaking down in the garden. I had a new set of tomato plants waiting to go out, and I had been hoping for some compost to speed their growth for a late harvest. My first tomato plants had gone out with the usual high spring hopes for early tomatoes, only to be sent to an early death by the cats.

For some reason, they had decided that my tomato patch was to be their spring wrestling ring. Up to then, they had been racing around the yard and flinging themselves on each other in mock fights in random locations. Once I ignored the cats long enough to set out the tomato seedlings, their doom was sealed. The cats zeroed in on the newest set of unworthy objects stealing attention from them and concentrated their play in their midst. My screams of anguish and cat deterrent and blocking methods sent them a short distance away in alert expectation, only to have them resume the match once I had to go on to my daily tasks.

I was soon shaking my head in sad resignation over the broken stems of my once prosperous seedlings. I mourned for their gallant fight for life against the furry fiends, then started more tomato seeds. My family is too cheap to buy more tomato seedlings after the first batch met such a fate, so a fall harvest was my best chance to get a few homegrown tomatoes. A good helping of compost would surely speed them along once the heat had persuaded the cats to snooze in the shade most of the time.

Every once in a while during breaks in my usual daily routine, I went out and chopped and spun the baby tumbler load, leaving the door open afterwards. By evening the material was considerably drier but no less fibrous. "Come on, baby," I urged, "Time to poop!" The tumbler sat there with its door open in a mute appeal for mercy. Obviously the baby needed more time, but the load only got mildly warm compared to what the bigger tumbler was doing. I retreated to the composting treatise and considered the matter.

Well, I had been adding a nitrogen source as recommended, but the baby never got up to the composting temperatures that the bigger tumbler was approaching. I decided to let it have a few more days to digest its load while I worked on the yard and prepared more material for the bigger one, which was greedily gulping down material by the bushel. I set the new tomato seedlings out in a forest of tall sticks in the middle of a horseshoe of daylilies tall and wide enough to deflect the cats, and soaked the ground both to water the tomatoes and to make muddy water hazards to deter the cats.

I then turned back to pruning and weeding the old flower beds. I had been working on them with considerable success so that Mother was encouraged that there actually was a chance that I might get her ornamentals pruned back into a garden again. When it came time to cut the lawn yesterday, she suggested using the new lawn mower to cut down and mulch the monkey grass borders around the back yard beds. It benefits from the occasional mowing when the tops get so thick that it begins to choke itself out.

That was the breakthrough that I had been hoping for. The monkey grass is fairly attractive, but it makes it much harder to care for the beds. It sulks if you walk or kneel on it and lies there in flattened reproach, so you have to either step over it and try to stand in whatever contorted position will allow you to reach the plant that needs grooming in the forest or else kneel with your stomach arched over it like a frightened cat while you try to reach the plant from beneath. Both positions excite considerable amusement and curiosity from the cats, but do nothing for the gardener turning into a pretzel of cramping muscles.

It also gave me the chance to try using the mower on the leaf piles to chop them into mulch. I had been considering trying that for a while but was wary of risking damaging the new mower given the grisly demise of the old mower. When the day of catastrophe came, Mom had been using it on the front lawn, tugging it over the heavy tangle of tree roots that laces the area. The ancient handle had ripped loose from the motor housing, tearing the motor and blade away from the frame at an unworkable angle. The mower died in rusty anguish among the tree roots it had been chopping along with the grass. I found a lawn mower on sale at the web site of a favorite local store, and Mother and Steve went forth to seize the prize still squabbling over the unnecessary waste of money from the loss of the old mower.

I had therefore been reluctant to try using the mower on any object potentially more harmful than grass in a flat, rootless area. However, given Mother's good mood and willingness to mulch the monkey grass, I pushed the mower past the monkey grass and into a leaf pile. It mulched it beautifully into tiny bits that already looked like it was nearly composted. A few more pushes, and the monkey grass and the nearby leaf piles had been reduced to nice, fine mulch. I stuffed as much into the bigger tumbler as I could fit in there and spun it in.

A few hours later, I went out to check on the tumblers. The baby was still sitting there, mildly warm and decidedly constipated. It may not be able to handle rough garden waste as easily as the bigger models, which would explain why it is supposed to be given at least a month in hot weather to digest its load once fully loaded. It digests soft kitchen scraps and newspaper quite well, but it stalls on whole leaves and grass.

On the other hand, the bigger tumbler was heating up rapidly and its load was wilting. I poked the composting thermometer into the load and read 120 degrees F, about 30 degrees above air temperature. I stuffed some more mulch into it and spun it in, my excitement growing. This was beginning to feel like an organic Christmas Eve again.

By the next morning, its temperature had risen to 140 degrees and the tumbler was too warm to touch comfortably longer than a brief pat, much hotter than the baby had ever gotten. Now the baby's plastic drum made sense; it provided more insulation which wasn't needed for the bigger models which might overheat. I spun in more kitchen waste but decided not to add more garden mulch. If the load wilted a bit more, maybe I could empty the contents of the baby tumbler into this bigger one and let it digest it along with its own hot load.

By evening the load had almost wilted enough to make room for part of the baby's load, so tomorrow I'm going to see how much I can fit in and try the baby with a load of nice soft kitchen waste, finely mulched garden waste, and finely mulched newspaper with some fertilizer for nitrogen once I've got it emptied. It did a good job with the soft stuff, but it may not heat up enough to handle the tough stuff quickly unless it is finely mulched so it can't ball up so badly. So far I haven't seen any balling up in the bigger tumbler, just material already a nice dark brown with a pleasantly earthy smell.