Intro to Soil
Come and play in the dirt with us. Get your hands dirty: feel, smell, appreciate the complexity of life that is required to grow life. Soil is a complex tapestry of texture, microbiology and mycellium. Explore how we can improve our soil to hold more water, grow more plants and improve our ecosystem.
Let's celebrate the earth beneath our feet!
We will...
During our time together, we will get our hands dirty with turning our kitchen compost, digging into our vermicompost worm bins, exploring the mulch basins and hugelkulture mounds. If you would like we can even muck out a bit of the rabbit or chicken pens,
We can check out the two cobb benches that I built and consider how simple soil can become building material a la cobb or adobe.
I will introduce a few simple soil tests showing you a pH meter for the soil and a basic shake test to quantify the amount of sand, clay, and silt in your soil.
I hope you leave with a visceral experience of how the organic materials of carbon and nitrogen work together to create beautiful rich soil even in our sandy desert.
"For many years..."
"For many years, my walks have taken me down an old fencerow and wooded hollow on what was once my grandfather's farm.
A battered galvanized bucket is hanging on a fence post near the head of the hollow, and I never go by it without stopping to look inside. For what is going on in that bucket is the most momentous thing I know, the greatest miracle that I have every heard of: it is making earth.
The old bucket has hung there through many autumns, and the leaves have fallen around it and some have fallen into it. Rain and snow have fallen into it, and the fallen leaves have held the moisture and so have rotted. Nuts have fallen into it, or been carried into it by squirrels; mice and squirrels have eaten the meat of the nuts and left the shells they and other animals have left their droppings; insects have flown into the bucket and died and decayed; birds have scratched in it and left their droppings or perhaps a feather or two.
This slow work of growth and death, gravity and decay, which is the chief work of the world, has by now produced in the bottom of the bucket several inches of black humus.
I look into that bucket with fascination because I am a farmer of sorts and an artist of sorts, and I recognize there an artistry and a farming far superior to mine, or to that of any human. I have seen the same process at work on the tops of boulders in a forest, and it has been at work immemorially over most of the land surface of the world. All creatures die into it, and they live by it." Wendell Berry