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.
