Doing What You Can

For those that don’t know I served in the US Army as an All-Source Intelligence Analyst which is a fancy way of saying I have been the S2/ Intelligence Section for all of my military career. I have spent dozens of field exercises sitting in a tent waiting for the S6 (Communication and Electronics), S4 (Supply) or the motor pool so I can do my job. I even spent 2 weeks in a Division level DRASH/Tent fielding at Ft Bliss with nothing but desks chairs and sticky notes showing where the future phones, computers, white boards and maps would be placed if or when we got them. So after sitting there for about 6 hours with SGMs and COLs stressfully walking through every 30 minutes to check what everyone else had already checked a dozen times, I left my 6 soldiers and went home for lunch to get my Intel education library. When I returned with books, FMs, charts, games and exercises an hour later the soldiers finally work up and began to do something. Like clockwork 5 minutes later the G3 CSM came in and had a fit because my soldiers where reading Sun Tzu’s Art of War, Miamoto Mushashi’s Book of Five Rings, Heinlein’s Starship Troopers, and Orson Scot Card’s Ender’s Game and playing chess instead of sitting up straight and doing nothing. After his rant on professional appearance, he looked at me as new WO1 and asked why I would let my soldiers do this? I answered in my best Chief voice at the time, “Doing what you can regardless of the how it looks is far better that sitting around and doing nothing”. Thankfully before he could explode his retort the DIV CSM walked in (likely to investigate the noise) and commented that “it was nice to see soldiers doing something productive during the fielding” and that he would be disappointed if the G2 wasn’t reading books and playing chess when there was nothing else to do. He then casually asked the G3 CSM what productive thing his soldiers where engaged in beside scrolling through their phone. Thus ended the wrath of one CSM and the elevation of the other.

Similarly, with the evenings still are dropping below 30 degrees F last week and this one, we are still in much of a holding pattern. We have plants and seeds ready to go in the ground, plans for how to deploy the plants by type, for our long-term increase in fertility. We even have been waiting to do some real weeding but alas it is all for not. Instead we sit waiting for the conditions to be right so we can deploy our forces, I mean resources into the fields. So what to do in the mean time?

Two weeks ago I built my wives raised beds and this week I filled them. Each raised bed is 2ft wide X 6ft long X 22in tall. So with the help of my children I filled the beds with four layers of material. The first layer was about 8 inches of raw rabbit manure with both straw and wood chip bedding. This layer will break down over time and absorb more water than the others, and since rabbit manure has a low acidity (almost neutral) it shouldn’t harm even the deepest roots.

The second layer was about 5 inches of regular soil from the yard. We dug out a high area in the old wheat field to level the soil for nightshade planting. This layer will catch and absorb nutrients from the top to layers and use the already present microorganisms to process and store these nutrients for later.

The third layer was about 1/2 inch of wood ash adding natural lime to the soil. this ash came from our fire pit that has been burning logs and some old pallet pieces. Don’t use ash from treated lumber due to the toxins in the wood that may transfer. My two youngest sifted all the old nails and aluminum bits (we have been self recycling our cans) to minimize injuries working in the beds in the future.

The final layer is a mix of aged compost from a local farm and soil from our garden leaving about 3 inches of space to the top of the boxes. This kind of bed will be used for my wives private garden and will grow mostly perennials and herbs. At least that’s what she told me as I put them in. Her bad back makes working in the normal garden painful at times so this allows her to knee next to the beds to weeds and harvest. They will also allow us to level the backyard over time.

No matter how you fill the time, I hope no CSM step in and mess up you mojo to much. And remember to keep moving forward regardless of the setbacks. Deven Little