Bat Power

     There are no pictures with this post, because it is abut poop. There may be a lot of new farms, large and small, starting up in this age of startups and back-to-the-landers. But how many of them can say they are powered by bats and llamas? That's right: First-Flower Farm is not only low-petrol, we are high on the poop chain, too! This is the haute stuff, and for me, its free!
     Let me explain. All this Domaine de Doo boasting comes about because I am fortunate in my friendships. You might say I know how to work my connections. For some, that means ascending the Ladder of Success. For me, it means getting out my Shovel of Attainment. Nothing makes me happier than getting a big pile of shit. Lucky for me, this spring yielded the mother lode from two most unusual sources.
    My friend Melissa has been an urban homesteader since long before it was cool. We two were already calling it "Suburban Homesteading" (a term WE invented) back in the mid '90s, when we did it without the benefit of the then-six-page Baker Creek seed list, the chic-chic linen smocks and Hunter boots or the cute chicken shanties. We labored with a baby on our hip and a shovel in our hands. Spring play dates for our then-toddlers became a mere by-product of trips to help her clean up her llama pasture and return with a pile of poopy mulch for my vegetable garden. The kids went off to rappel down the swing set with dog leashes while we shovelled. Her farm was called "Honey Hill" for the bees her husband and she raised. After her divorce, when most of her income came from the byproducts of her llama herd, she pondered a switch to "Hot Shit Farm."
     The best thing is, llama shit isn't actually hot. Like the goat manure I was familiar with from my childhood days on a Michigan dairy goat farm, it issues forth in compact little pellets, and can be used on plants without burning them. After the stink of anaerobic decomposition from winter-matted dirty bedding hay has dissipated, there's no smell to it either, making llama a neighborly manure to use on a pocket farm or Suburban(TM) Homestead.
     When Melissa heard I had thrown in the 9-5 paid farm job for a farm endeavor of my own this spring, she was supportive if not downright jubilant. At last she must have thought, We'll have something in common again: now she can see what it's really like to starve, doing what you believe in!  As a gift to my infant endeavor, she gave me a division of lovage and a seedling agastache (both of whose parent plants I had given her years ago) and, best of all, three giant buckets of gorgeous llama compost. And though her llamas have won her many ribbons at the state and national level, it's the byproduct I'm admiring. It, too, deserves ribbons. It is now feeding the phenomenal rise of my first-ever crop of snapdragons-from-seed, as well as a stand of "Copperhead" amaranth and  white "Psyche" cosmos and half-a-dozen artichoke seedlings.
     The rest of the garden is growing before my eyes on a twenty-year accumulation of bat guano.
     When the family trust decided to put The Patient Spouse's ancestral family farm on the market, the realtor advised them, among other things, to clean up the attic. The Farmhouse dates back centuries, and the attic has a marvelous accumulation of concomitantly ancient things: a big-wheeled spinning wheel you can picture Betsy Ross or her compatriots spinning wool upon; a barber's cabinet that might also have held bloodletting and surgical tools when those things were a hairstylist's purview; gas fixtures abandoned at the outset of the Edison bulb. It is a dark and marvelous place. Through the center of all this historical oddmentry, running from gable to gable, was the thing I wished most to inherit: a pile in places 6" deep of petrified bat guano. While The Patient Spouse checked the furnace and tilled the family vegetable garden for our potatoes and corn, I put on a dust mask and shoveled seven 5-gallon pails of pure poop. I could hardly believe my great good fortune: first, that it was there to be shoveled and, second, that no one else in the family wanted to inherit it!
     Actually, I may have made off like a bandit in the inheritance department. A little Googling revealed that my guano has a chemical analysis of 10-3-1 (Nitrogen-Phosphorus-Potassium). By contrast, the balanced organic fertilizer I paid $30 for a single 5-gal pail of is about 3-3-3. Not only that, the guano available by the box online runs $10.50 (on sale for spring, marked down from $13.95 plus shipping for those without Amazon Prime) for a 11/2 lb box. So my free attic treasure would be worth about $300-$600. Antiques Roadshow might want to film this for it's next Surprises From the Attic segment!
     Online, one can select from a multi-ethnicity of global bat dungs, among them Desert, Jamaican. Indonesian, Mexican, Peruvian and Sumatran. But not all these bat communities poop equally, and some sport a much lower chemical analysis than my rich, local source. The proof of my poop's value is evident in the way my weak little transplants have done on two foliar feeds with a dung-comfey tea and a little dusting to top dress them at planting. Everything is thriving, and the vegetable starts have set roots and grown so fast I hardly recognize them from one day to the next!
    There is also a happy endnote to this tale. I was in the attic a few days ago to release a couple of trapped starlings, and the floor was already sprinkled with more bat doo. Melissa's llamas are always under good care and thrive even when she hasn't. But the bats hereabouts have been a beleaguered species of late. So it is good to see evidence that those clouds which once darkened the skies as they flew out the chimney on summer evenings are still alive and active, tucked up there among the hot, dark eaves. Bloom Where You are Planted.