Here in the Midwest, we occasionally get an unseasonably warm day at this time of year. Talk about a mid-winter break. It's been sixty this week. Usually in January the temperature struggles to get above freezing, with lots of snow thrown in to make spring seem light years away.
Any day when the ground is not frozen is a day for some sort of gardening activity. So for the last two days I've been digging up dirt and spreading it on my whimsical garden.
I think about dirt a lot. Now referred to as soil, it is a subject of endless fascination and struggle for me.
Clay is soil but it isn't really dirt. Dirt is loam.
Since taking possession of the badly-eroded garden plot, I have become a scavenger of topsoil. When the river went down after the spring flood, it left behind a deep layer of mud. Somebody else's topsoil then dried to a very fine silt that was easy to shovel into two buckets. Not so easy was staggering up the bank with them to Rosie and the garden cart. Many buckets were required to fill the cart; my arms felt longer.
Making Amends to Mistreated Soil
I did a lot of research about techniques for clay soil. Some suggestions were unacceptable, like moving to someplace else.
I was annoyed to read about a man who transformed some hard clay into luscious loam with the help of a cadre of volunteers. Who couldn't?
Similarly, the French Intensive method with all that horse manure would not work for me here. I have no pickup truck. Paying for someone to deliver horse manure is not in my budget.
Raising earthworms for their castings was another option, but there was something about getting started with them that sounded like opening a can of worms.
I had to get realistic and work on a few square feet at a time. Therefore, what I did was slip through the barbed wire fence and snitch some dried cow pies from the neighboring field. I didn't think they would be missed.
On My Way to the River
With the current spell of sunny warm weather, I was off to get more instant topsoil down at the river. Passing a big oak not far from the house, I stopped to check the undergrowth. There was lots of brushy stuff that had held leaves in place for years. All I had to do was hack out the grape vines, buckbrush and poison ivy roots. I emerged in two days with four Rosie carts of friable soil that smelled wonderfully woodsy.
Up at the garden, I dumped the bucket of kitchen compost materials, formerly known as stinky garbage, onto the clay. Then I spread the buckets of dirt on top.
I am having such satisfaction rebuilding the soil that sometimes I fear I will never plant any veggies. I'll merely keep adding amendments and mixing them in with Tillie, my Mantis tiller.
I believe it was better when we called our home Earth instead of the current The Planet. Earth is close at hand, underfoot, and is synonymous with soil. The Planet is viewed from outer space. We don't live in the blue part.
