My cousin planned to help me out today (Saturday) to pick up some compost with his pick-up truck, but he had to bail due to a family emergency last night. So off I went to STL Compost in Fenton with my Camry--not ideal to haul a cubic yard of compost in a Camry. If you do it, you should make 2 trips, hauling only one-half cubic yard each time. With a full cubic yard of compost in my trunk and front passenger area, my car was way rear-heavy. I drove only between 10 and 30 miles an hour, usually no faster than 20.

If you find yourself in this situation, pump up your tires with air almost to their maximum rating, which is shown on the sidewalls. Although your car's ideal tire pressure is usually lower and it's shown often in your driver-side door jamb. Anyway, the extra air in the tires really helped to haul that cubic yard.

The cubic yard filled exactly 20 plastic garbage bags, 14 or so went in the trunk. The other 6 in the front passenger area (in the seat and foot well). No way should you fill the garbage bags even close to full, because then they'll be way too hard to lift into your car. My plastic garbage bags were 30 gallons and 55 gallons each. I felt the 55-gallon bags were better to use simply because the plastic fabric seemed thicker/stronger and less likely to tear, thus easier to lift. But leave a whole lot of empty space in either-sized bag or you won't be able to lift them.

It took me about 2 hours to fill those 20 bags with a cubic yard of compost or 27 cubic feet. What sped things along was wearing a large plastic glove to push the compost into the bag AND especially what helped things along was encircling the opening of the bag around the top of a 5-gallon bucket whose bottom I cut out. This makes fast work of bagging compost--probably way faster than using a shovel. That's what someone on YouTube said, anyway, and he appears to be right, although I didn't use a shovel for comparison. Just used a gloved hand to quickly push compost into a plastic bag whose opening was controlled by a 5-gallon bucket with no bottom. Works amazingly well.

This is awesome compost. The texture is fine and the color is very black. Whatever made up the compost is unrecognizable anymore (like it should be). Well, every once in a while you'd see a recognizable wood chip, but this compost has very few wood chips in it. This is STLcompost.com's "Lawn and Turf" compost ($29 per cubic yard). Their "Premium Compost" at $23 per cubic yard ain't really the premium stuff. The "Lawn and Turf" is. The $23 compost had lots of wood chips still visible in it and it was hot when you stuck your hand inside the huge pile. It was also a little smelly. That's not good--it's not finished yet, but they were sellin' it. Now, the "Lawn and Turf" compost for $29 was cool to the touch when you stuck your hand inside the huge pile and it smelled fine. It's located underneath a huge green, domed tent.

Tomorrow I'll top-dress the lawn with some, and mix some into a planting bed for squash. The squash seeds have been soaking in water for 5 days.