Greetings Communities of Beings,
The 27th song of the Plant Songs Project is called Microbes.
Microbes have been on my mind this week as the weather has warmed and I’ve begun the monumental task of compost sifting and spreading. Our chicken flock does most of the composting work at our house. I designed a system in which the chickens would alternate pasturing on two separate garden plots, every other year. The plot that the chickens are not on gets planted in annual vegetables. However, I no longer rotate them in that way, because I prefer a no-dig system with permanent beds and mulched paths, AND because since the system was implemented, an extremely tall house was built next door which partially shades one of those plots in all seasons except for a short window around the summer solstice.
Chickens make a mad mess out of wood-chipped paths. So now I have the annual Spring task of screening chicken yard compost and applying it to the annual vegetable beds. I have 9 beds and each one takes about 30-45 minutes of work to apply compost, and I decided it’s worth that effort to keep the no-dig and permanent path system. In the wintertime there is one garden area that the birds do have access to that I also plant with annual vegetables, during the growing season. In this area I don’t need to apply much compost, since the chickens are on it during the winter. They’re manuring it for me, but they’re also scratching, and digging holes. This has benefits, but one big disadvantage of it is that they bring up a lot of weed seeds. That plot gets very weedy in the growing season, while the plot that they never go on with the permanent beds and paths has very little weeds.
When I apply compost, it’s only top dressing (adding compost to the top, not mixing it in). I like that system. And I enjoy the exercise and direct sun in the Springtime when I’ve got to do the screening and spreading work. And I enjoy the microbes. Every time I hear the statistic it gets higher and more impressive, but it’s now said that in a teaspoon of healthy soil contains over 1 billion microbes. My epic Spring task is good for me. I get exercise. I get sun exposure before it’s too strong. I get fresh air. A perhaps best of all, I get a microbiome inoculation. I have to wear good gloves when I’m sifting compost, which involves working it through a screen of half-inch hardware cloth with my hands. I’d have no skin left on my fingertips if it weren’t for the gloves. But plenty of compost gets in, as my dirty hands will show. Yeah microbes. Don’t worry, I wash hands well before I play the piano.
Now onto the music. Last week’s song, Pinus rigida: Endurance had a great deal of structural organization. Microbes is much more random. I recorded an improvisation during which I got into a texture like you hear in this song. I enjoyed it. I began writing something like it on paper, but it was very random. I didn’t know where it was going. I had a couple nice sections that had long melody notes held out by the right hand, while this 8th note texture was happening underneath. I also liked the sound of the 8th note texture without held melody notes over it. So a day later, I wrote a section like that. I decided that section could happen before, between, and after the two sections I wrote first that had the long melody notes, and then the form emerged. I suppose it’s like a Rondo form again. ABACA. I enjoyed learning to play this one. I expect that it will sound pretty random to you, until you hear it a few times.