Playing God and Creating Soil

Gardening has always been a key part of my life and sometimes it makes me feel like God. So far I have had twelve different gardens; all but three of them I started, literally, from the weedy ground up.

In 1999 while living in Guilford, Vermont and gardening a patch that had been gardened for at least 40 years, our rototiller broke permanently. I was tired of the noisy gas-guzzler and ready to take a new route to gardening. A trip to the public library rewarded me with a copy of John Jeavons' book "How to Grow More Vegetables and Fruits, Nuts, Berries, Grains, and Other Crops Than You Ever Thought Possible On Less Land Than You Can Imagine." He is the director of the GROW BIOINTENSIVE Mini-Farming program for Ecology Action. (See our link at the bottom of this blog.) My gardening life has never been the same since.

There are many parts to his ideas about gardening that excite me. One of them is the idea that you can actively grow soil. Not just use it or prevent it from eroding, but build on what you have. Help Mother Nature to nurture you. I liked the idea.

Since that year I have been growing compost crops. For example, I grow grains that can be harvested for the cereal, of course, but grown mostly to build compost piles to later feed back to the soil. My crop rotation now includes about 60% of the garden area for compost crops.

As I see it, I'm growing feed for my livestock - the microorganisms in the soil who do all the real work around here to cook up food for my vegetable plants. When my cattle are happy, I'm happy.

So, I've been playing God lately. Perhaps it would be fairer to say I've been imitating Mother Nature. I have been creating soil.

Of course, each of us has to start right where we are with what we have. In my case, this land came with a deep fertile fine-textured clay soil. This is a good soil to start from, but it means that water does not drain well. We had standing water in our first garden bed during rainy season and all the plants drowned. When it is wet we can't walk two steps without getting huge clumps of mud collected under foot. When it is dry the ground is hard as a brick, literally. And it has a dense covering of crabgrass - a plant that wants to become the king of the plant kingdom by rooting at every node and with the ability to grow six feet a week in rainy season. My hands ache from trying to keep it pulled from around the garden edges.

My goal is to grow soil that is ideal for pampered vegetable and grain crops planted in the limited area of our greenhouse and intensive garden beds. I want soil that is easy for me to work and weed. (In my past I've gardened in natural sandy loam soils and hardly knew what a treasure I had in terms of soil texture and tilth!) Here I want to develop a soil that tender baby roots can penetrate and make good contact with to find all the water, nutrients, air, and warmth that they need to grow without restrictions.

So, while playing God, I stripped the crabgrass, roots and all, off the garden beds, surrounding walkways, and from the soil under the greenhouse. I loosened all the topsoil that I could from the roots and saved it for my soil concocting. Using a wire mesh screen with one centimeter openings, I sifted rocks out of many cubic yards of river sand. I spent hours under the oaks trees in the local forest stealing their supply of leaf mold and soil to bring back to my mixing area. When I didn't have compost ready to add, I raked up dry manure from our neighbor's horse corral to contribute the organic matter needed in the mix for my garden.

With all the ingredients ready I measured carefully by the shovelful equal parts of topsoil, sand, leaf mold, and organic matter and put it all in the wheelbarrow. This was my mixing bowl and I used a trusty hoe instead of a big wooden spoon to thoroughly blend the combination. Adding rainwater from the barrel waiting under our eaves, I gave it enough moisture to change the colors dark and the smell to a rich forest flavor. Not so much water that it dripped and oozed, but just enough to settle the dust and bring it all together into a loose dough.

While I played God, Steve was hard at work, too. With a garden fork he opened the clay as deep as the tines would go, working in a cross hatch pattern so it was all as loose as possible. He added more sifted sand, letting it flow around the fork and down to form drainage paths for the water and roots to follow.

Then I wheeled the soil-feast into the greenhouse or to the garden bed. One shovelful at a time I filled the raised beds with my approximation of sandy loam soil. Then raked it level and watered it in to place.

In a few years I hope to grow the best soil possible. So, last of all I invited all the magical microscopic life to come live here, to make these raw ingredients into real soil.

It is clear that I'm not God yet, but I know I'm helping Mother Nature by creating a seed bed ready for planting.

Riches

Ismael went into the woods near his ranch, El Ojo de Agua, to help us find some leaf litter to use as fertilizer for our garden. He knew a place where trees had been felled and sawn into boards years before. Now the bed of sawdust had rottened into soil.

With every swing of his mattock he dug a foot into the ground bringing up a pile of dirt the texture of moist cornmeal. "¡Ire!" Look at this, he exclaimed with every new strike. I felt like we were mining black gold. This well composted sawdust is just what we need in the garden to help loosen the clay soil and lower the pH.

I was working nearby scooping already heaped leaf litter into a used feed sack. In my hand I noticed a cup shaped object about the size of a pingpong ball. "What is this?" I asked in Spanish and put it in his calloused palm.

"Oh, it comes from the trees. It's dirt," he said as he crumbled with his fingers.

"Ire." Again he dug another deep scoop of delicious earth. Now I had half of a nut in my hand; it reminded me of a small black walnut shell.

"Look at this," I said as I handed it over.

"Nogal," he responded. I looked around for the familiar nut tree. He pointed to our left, "It's over there."

We continued working; him diging, me filling large bags. "They say soil is richest if there are many different kinds of leaves and organic matter in it," Ismael informed me.

"Yes, it's true for people, too. Those who are friends with many different kinds of people are the richest in love."

"Estoy de acuerdo," he agreed.

One Pine Tree At a Time

Yuya dropped by yesterday afternoon to get a tour of our garden. She usually has classes at the preparatory school in Ciudad del Maíz on Wednesdays, but the teachers had meetings all day and she got a day off.

Her first question was about all the tall grasses that I cultivate in the garden. They are wheat, barley, oats, and buckwheat that I grow to cut for making compost. Later in the spring I'll let them grow to seed which I'll collect for the next round of compost crops. (I only use open pollinated varieties, so I can save seeds to use and share.) We checked out the new compost pile I'm building up with all the plant materials that I'm clearing before a flurry of planting next week. I described the layers of green materials, the dry materials (sawdust right now because I don't have anything else), and the thinner layer of garden soil that is a catalyst for the good changes in a compost pile. In a way, it feels like I'm making a rich meal for the soil. I feed the soil; it feeds me. This made sense to Yuya.

She told me that she had taken a class last year in which they planted, tended, and harvested a garden at school. She liked to spend every spare moment after class in the garden. Here at home in Papagayos it's hard for her to keep a garden. Her mother's chickens scratch out everything she plants unless she covers the new baby plants with a lot of thorny brush. Even then, the children in the neighborhood often make a mess of things because she isn't around most of the time to watch over her garden.

Yuya went on to talk about her current classes; her favorite is Ecology. She has hopes for planting shade trees here in our village, especially near the Catholic chapel, the three schools, and the town playing field where soccer, baseball, and horse races happen in their seasons. I was delighted to hear of her thinking about this type of project, because I share her interest in planting and caring for beautiful public trees. She was a little frustrated, however, because she had recently found out that an opportunity to do just this had been lost to Papagayos. The town judge had been given the paperwork to apply for a state funded program of reforestation. Signatures had to be collected and the papers returned by a deadline. He did nothing with them. If only she had known, she would have willingly taken this responsibility on herself. "If we don't take action to care for our village, no one will," she said in exasperation.

During our first year here, Steve and I worked with students at the middle school to transplant trees in their schoolyard. Only a few have survived, but it was a start that I wanted Yuya to know about. She and I walked around to the shady side of our house to see the 38 young piñon pine trees that I sprouted last fall. I also have planted and am waiting for the sprouting of a few mesquitillo seedlings. The mesquitillo is a lovely local hardwood tree that has been completely eliminated close to our village because of over-harvesting and no reforestation. Through EcoSol we have made contact with the NGO Reforestamos México. (See the link to their website below.) They are providing educational and technical assistance to local groups all over the country to plant new forests and improve the health of existing woodlands. They are helping me learn to grow seedlings for future transplanting.

Yuya and I agreed that if each person takes action and does what she or he can, we will create a greener world.

Grow Where You Are Transplanted

I've always kept a garden. Our family had a Memorial Day Weekend ritual of rototilling and planting a summer garden in the Willamette Valley of Oregon. One year, a new boy in the neighborhood passed by and asked my father, “Where did you get all that dirt?” I always knew there was good earth under my feet.

In October, 2006, less than one month after we moved to Papagayos, we set to work clearing sods from a three foot by twelve foot patch of ground. We hauled in sand and learned from our neighbor Hector how to collect tierra de la sierra or leaf litter from under the large oak trees in the hills that surround our village. We scratched these soil amendments into the wet native clay soil. Then we planted lettuce, beets, garlic, spinach, and peas which we harvested until April.

Since that first garden bed we have expanded to thirteen double-dug beds for a total of almost 500 square feet of planting surface. Growing a garden here keeps me learning, thinking, and talking with our neighbors.

An elderly friend who has lived here all her life visited that first garden bed. She was pleased to see the greens and root crops and was impressed by the peas. But she had to ask what the plants were with the knife-like leaves. When I told her they were garlic she clasped her hand to her mouth. “I didn't know you could grow garlic here!” I thought to myself, I didn't know you couldn't. We have a lot to share with each other.

Some of the issues that had to be puzzled through included how to work with this heavy clay soil, how to manage a growing season 362 days long, and how to recalibrate my four-season-gardening mindset to a wet season/dry season climate. There is still a lot to learn. I haven't yet found a source for statistics on seasonal high and low temperatures and average monthly rainfall, though there is a weather recording station about two miles from here. Neither have I found a regional seed catalog and the choices in Ciudad del Maíz are meager.

All the challenges are outweighed by the ease of growing greens year round, eating strawberries in January and February, and harvesting peas over a five month period from one planting.

I've heard it said that one should grow wherever one is transplanted – and I intend to keep doing so.