Locals Leave Gifts for the Garden

By Cate Huisman, 3-02-10

Being town residents who don’t keep our own animals, every year it’s a challenge for us to find something to feed the raspberries. The first year we had them, I was able to barter some editing work for goat droppings, which I’m sure all readers will recognize as a heck of a deal. It made for great raspberries, too.

But the following year my goat contact was gone. Persistent questioning among friends did not reveal further obliging goats, but finally, at high school soccer game, I was able to locate a source of similar blessings from a flock of sheep. This too made for great raspberries, and we pursued this course for several years until we tired of transporting the stuff in the back of the car.

This year, however, we received a delivery. Having left town for the holidays, we weren’t home when it arrived, and the bounty wasn’t revealed until the snow melted in the back yard. It wasn’t exactly on the raspberries, but that was just as well, as the moose who had left the gifts probably would have done the canes some harm if he’d decided to bed down among them.

In my first several years in Sandpoint, I never saw a moose, and I was convinced their existence was a story made up for tourists. In the past two years of heavy snows, however, moose have been turning up in town, and I’ve become a believer. But we didn’t expect them in this year of so little snow, nor did we dare to hope that they would leave us just what our raspberries needed.

All that was necessary was to move the moose offerings from their random drop site along the south fence to the raspberry bed by the alley. This wasn’t as easy as it first appeared, however, as the droppings had been deposited in the shade of a privacy fence a neighbor had put up. As a result, much of the bounty was frozen to the leaves I’d raked into the area last fall. While this simplified transport to the appropriate spot under the raspberries, it hindered distribution.

In the unseasonable sunshine, however, it was fairly easy to set up a solar heating system to prepare the moose droppings for their highest and best use. And it gave me something to do with the snow shovel. I can’t say that for much else that’s happened this winter.