The results of the vegetable trials are in, and they are looking good. As documented on The Earth Blog I have been growing a few different things in a small raised bed, just to see if I could: we still have a continuous crop of spinach; the lettuce is just going to seed but has served us well; the tomatoes are plumping up nicely and the French beans (or do I still have to call them “Freedom Beans”?) are providing a small, if tasty accompaniment to meals. The pak choi, on the other hand, was riddled with some very specific mite — leaving it looking like a drawer full of doilies — so I won’t be trying that again.

Slugs and snails were a problem, until I realised that the best disposal method was to collect them at night and deposit them in the wild area at the bottom of our street the next morning. Three nights of this and they are gone — all but the tiny ones, which the resident frog (who lives under a pot) seem to be dealing with brilliantly.

So now the experiment has been deemed a success, I am turning over a much larger part of the garden to growing: just over half of the small meadow, which will be replanted where there is more sun. So, bye bye to the bizarrely angled arbor, the rose bushes which caught many a bedsheet in their thorns, and the pear tree which only ever bore two pears a year; hello to two new raised beds which, after some judicious pruning of the ever-fecund plum tree, will have plenty of light to thrive in.

I can’t do it yet, though. First I have to cover the ground for at least six months to kill off the grasses, and then build the raised beds, after which I will need to fertilise the ground. This is where the poo comes in.

At the bottom of my street, and a little further on is a country park, which contains a bridleway. It isn’t that busy, but enough horses use it to make collecting the manure worthwhile — and that’s what I did this morning. As I passed a dog walker, pushing my wheelbarrow and spade, he said, “On a manure run are you?” I didn’t feel so odd after that, although scooping up great dollops of poo while runners went past attached to their iPods did feel a little strange — but in a way I felt a lot more normal than them.

I came home with a barrow full of manure and nowhere to put it, as it needs to rot down for a few months; so knocked up (surely a loaded expression) a little container from scrap wood and leftover bricks, which you see above. This I put the poo in. A few more “manure runs” and it’ll be full: a pile of rich, vegetable growing, promise.

Simple things make me very happy.