Back where I’m from, I had a friend growing up named Jarvis Seaton. Jarvis’s daddy was the school biology teacher/bus driver. He also truck farmed about two acres and sold fresh produce to state highway passersby from a front yard roadside stand on one acre called the ‘home patch.’ His other acre was called the ‘second patch’ and was down the road next to a small white, clapboard Baptist church that he and his family attended. 

Mr. Seaton was always looking for a way to increase the organic matter in his giant vegetable gardens. He had tried green manure (vetch) but had found that it stayed too boggy most years to get it turned under early enough for it to be completely decomposed by corn planting time. He had collected leaves during the weekends in the fall and during winter break from school and allowed them to rot until spring season. This worked well but was very time consuming during a time when he normally had a job at the local cotton gin writing weigh tickets for extra Christmas money. He had gotten gin trash (hulls and stems removed during the delinting process) from the gin and cow manure from a barn near his house but both brought with them the seed of unrelenting weeds like cocklebur, Johnson grass and morning glory. 

He was an enterprising amateur agronomist who had read about farming methods in less civilized parts of the world. He subscribed to an obscure quarterly publication committed to the groundbreaking idea of ‘low input’ sustainable agriculture. 

In one of these publications he found an article entitled Chinese Peasant Farmers Can’t Afford to Waste Their Waste. The article described how for centuries human waste has been used to fertilize rice paddies and vegetable gardens. 

He had frittered away enough time. The town across the river had a sewage treatment plant that produced tons of dried waste he had seen in windrows next to the facility. He would see them after school the next day.

After talking to the plant manager, it turns out that people already used this stuff in their gardens as a soil conditioner. They even gave him a brochure, co-authored by state and federal officials, assuring him that the material was perfectly safe. They showed him how the sludge is brewed and mechanically stirred in giant round vats then sprayed out on concrete pads to totally dry, then pushed into windrows for the public to collect…and they would even use a machine to load it on your truck or trailer for free! 

Spring break came the first week in April back then. Over a four-day period from Wednesday through Saturday, Jarvis and I made a little spending money helping spread dozens of pickup and trailer loads of this black gold, as his daddy called it, onto the ‘second patch.’ By the time we were finished the entire acre was quilted in Mr. Seaton’s newfound treasure.

The next morning during Sunday School came a spring rain that was light but steady for about 10 minutes. By the time church let in it had begun to get warm and the deacons raised the windows. About ten minutes into the service, an embarrassed Mrs. Winfred quietly got up with her new baby for a diaper change. The two other women with young ones checked the backs of their baby’s diapers for a problem. Other mothers scowled at their toddlers and elementary age children. Old women elbowed their husbands. An unmistakable smell brought on the shortest sermon ever preached in that little church, with people holding handkerchiefs over their mouths nearly running to their vehicles.

The folks at the sewage treatment plant left out the part about “turning under immediately after application” and “rehydration” when they gave Mr. Seaton his instructions. From that day on his ‘second patch’ was known by every member of that church as Mr. Seaton’s “number two patch.”