Weed Gehenna

My eleven year-old son Reid is the anointed "hole-digger" of our household. If I need a hole dug, Reid is "da boy". All I need to tell him is where, how big, how deep, and a few minutes or hours later, it's dug (He also pockets a little cash in the process).

Last year, I built five planters. Four were built and put into service - the fifth was built later in the season, and actually a little too late to be useful. But in preparation for the planter, a hole needed to be dug. Reid was in business!

My planter installation goes something like this. The planters I build are uniform, and are 4' x 8' x 12" high. I use two 2" x 6" boards for the siding, which gives me an effective planter soil depth about 9" above ground level. Since certain plant roots can penetrate the soil beyond the 9" depth, I dig out the soil about 18" below ground level and mix my amendments (compost, pre-composted plant material, sand, etc.) in with the native soil. This gives me a nice, deep loam for those deep rooted plants.

Well, the location of the fifth hole Reid dug turned out to be too shady to make a decent planter... so I ended up with this nice little pit near my fence line. Hmmm. What should I do with this? It was too far away from our back door to be a cozy fire pit - our neighbors have a great fire pit, where they roast hot dogs and marshmallows, but it is less than 20' from their back door - this hole was a good 100+' from mine, and it was in a garden area, not a patio. Should I fill it back in? I wasn't sure I wanted to pay to fill it (cheapskate!), and I certainly didn't want to do the back-breaking labor myself for naught. Besides, the soil exhumed from the hole is sandy, and could be used for filling one of my other planters if need be.

As I was weeding my non-growing areas over this past weekend, I noticed I was creating a nice bale of weed debris, and then it struck me - I could use the hole to make a "weed gehenna"!

What is a "weed gehenna"?

In the gospel of Mark, chapter 9, verses 43-48, Jesus is talking with His disciples about hell, which He used the word "gehenna". In hell [gehenna], "the worm does not die, and the fire is not quenched" (verse 44, NASB).

The word "gehenna" was derived from an actual place outside of the walled city of Jerusalem, whic was a refuse pile for trash, dead animals, etc. In other words, it was a dump. The fires of gehenna burned on, smouldering and seemingly without end, and the worms helped the decomposition process along. You could say (or at least I could!) that gehenna was like a giant compost pile.

I like compost piles. You can take plant matter, manure, a little moisture, and after a little time has passed, voila! Compost! In layman's terms (since I couldn't give a biological explanation, anyway), the moisture causes the plant and other matter to heat up (the microscopic things start a feeding frenzy, eating away at the food source), and when things cool down, the worms get involved, also eating up the food source. The heat and the worms digest the vegetation and other matter, turning it into black gold - nutrient-rich compost.

So, my hole is a "weed gehenna" - a compost pile, where the worm does not die, and the fire (heat) is not quenched!