Who doesn't love a bonfire? I'm an avid composter. I love having a place for my food scraps and garden debris, where they can sit and rot and eventually have their nutrients returned to the soil. I have been known to tuck apple cores and banana peels into my pocket, to carry them home and add them to my compost pile rather than throw them in the trash. We have maintained brush piles of dead sticks and other organic material that's not suitable for the compost pile, and we

When we first moved in this summer, the orchard was barely accessible. The aisle between the first two rows of trees had been mowed fairly recently, but the next seven or more rows were surrounded with tall grass and high weeds. Half of the trees had "companion plants"--that's my term for the black walnuts, ash trees, and multiflora roses that the birds had planted next to the trees. Even with our snazzy new John Deere zero-turn mower it was laborious to clear the grass ar