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Don’t Treat Soil Like Dirt

 

In the daily lives of most of us, soil is treated like dirt. Soil gets no respect.  Since we think of it as dirt, we know it only as what we can walk on, build a house on and that it supports all these fine roads we drive on. That is most people.  Then there is a group that does the gardening thing from a few pots to the exotic landscaping.  For this group, soil is still dirt but it is there to support what is planted in the landscape program, but generally it is still Dirt, more or less. Then there are those who grow plant life for a living and actually depend on what they put into this Dirt to come back up and make a profit.  A good portion of this group it seems, is highly suspect of treating soil as dirt even while demanding that it produce their living.

Some years ago I went to an all day conference on soil… Dirt.  At first I could not imagine that anyone could talk all day about Dirt.  Was I ever surprised!  Though modestly educated, I had no idea what really went on under our shoes.  It was quite comparable to seeing these beautiful photographs of an elegant unknown universe taken by the Hubel telescope.

There is a remarkable world right below our feet and how we treat it and understand its function really has a lot to do with how we live, or better, should live and more importantly, how the soil needs to be treated in order to produce the proper vegetable resources that is the mainstay of our present culture.

Soil , let us say healthy soil, is perhaps the most tangible and essential resource we have. Air and water, our most basic elements, seem to come from some “other” place.  It is hard for us to get a handle on where air and water come from but we can get right down to facts about soil because we know it comes from grinding up various parts of our earth and we are either standing on it or on something that is based on the soil.

The problem most of us have with the soil is quite similar to the relationship in some poor marriages. It is just an object that is “there”.  As in all relationships, awareness of how the other party works, in this case… soil, helps to produce a better life.

Soil in its most productive state is really a lively environment full of all kinds of living things.  Below the surface we have a great range of organisms from the large worms and other such burrowing creatures, down to the microorganisms, which consist of such things as Bacteria, Fungi, Protozoa Arthropods and Nematodes.  Now, when you stick a root system into this world, it becomes even more complicated when the symbiotic exchange of nutrients begin to evolve.  The roots get busy and the minute hairs begin the exchange of water, electrolysis and various nutrients needed by the plant.  This all works quite well as long as the soil has not been maltreated.

Basically soil comes in three starter packages: humus, clay and sand.  What we generally work with is a mixture of these elements.  Sand, in general is rather useless for basic growing  and is used to loosen a mixture or for special purposes. Now what we want to look for in a good soil is proper sized small storage cavities or “pantries”.  These pantries can be the storage room for the exchange of nutrients, the air chambers for soil aeration, for water storage and a sort of battery bank for soil-plant electrolysis.   A lot can go on in these minute spaces.  If they are too large the various connections for processing is lost.  If they are too small or collapsed, well, nothing goes on and you can figure the results… a sick or dead plant. Think of rich soil, falling through your fingers.

Now who or what murders the soil.  Basically three things: over tilling, compaction and chemicals. Over watering can lead to compaction especially if a shallow hardpan is present.  In the classic farm world it was standard to “turn” the soil rather deep.  This was done to turn under decaying vegetation, dissuade weed formation and aerate the soil.  Research shows that this is not always the best method of planting especially when it comes to soil care.  With the newer “no till” processes, the soil’s ecosystem is left relatively undisturbed and is in a much healthier state to serve up plant nutrients.  Compaction comes from the continuous application of weight in the same areas.  This can be humans, various machinery and general overuse of the soil with little respect to the balance that is needed for the  soil “room” to allow its community to grow.  Possibly the worst offender to the life of soil is chemical fertilizers.  In many cases it requires heavy equipment to apply the product, contributing to the compaction problem.  Since only about say, 30% of the product is used by the plant, there is quite a lot of it that goes somewhere else.  A large portion of this gets eventually into the run off system and winds up aiding in the creation of “dead zones” in many of our seas. Another portion percolates down to a point and then begins to create an unnatural “hard pan”.  It can also clog up some of the “pantries” causing problems with the constant ebb and flow of water, air and electrolysis so essential to plant life.  Lastly chemical fertilizers have a bad record of simply accumulating and poisoning the soil causing the plant to become ever more dependent on more chemical fertilizer rather than on a natural mode of absorbing nutrients.

This short discussion about soil is really to encourage us all to be more observant of nature and how this can help us be more productive and hopefully learn more about soil.  Rich soil has a rich life.

 

Wade Swicord

http://www.agrowgreen.com