~Gary Snyder, The Practice of the Wild
“Humans–despite their artistic pretensions, their sophistication, and their many accomplishments–owe their existence to a six-inch layer of topsoil and the fact that it rains.”
~Anonymous, copied from a seed catalog
In April of 1955, one month short of my 10th birthday, I attended my first 4-H meeting. Earlier that winter my parents had given me a choice: I could either join a Boy Scout troop the American Legion was organizing or become a member of the Howard Go-Getters. I had been involved in an active Cub Scout group, which met weekly in an old shed behind the den mother’s house, and my initial inclination was to continue scouting. But after attending a Boy Scout organizational meeting, both my Dad and I suspected this endeavor would prove short-lived–as indeed it did. And so on the first Monday evening in April, my parents took me to my first 4-H meeting, held across the street from the Legion Hall in the county extension office. The Go-Getters was a well-established club with over 25 members, and without further thought, I became a 4-Her. The transition was made easier by the fact the club was seeking a second adult sponsor, and my Dad agreed to volunteer, a position he held through the nine years I remained active in the group.
Of that first meeting, I remember nothing, but events later that evening proved indelibly memorable. Shortly after I fell asleep, my Dad rushed into my bedroom, grabbed me from my bed, and carried me out of the farm house to the storm cellar. In the short space between the house and the cellar, we were blasted by a gale-force wind laden with rain and sand from an old sand box. This would be my first descent into the storm cellar. The tin door was usually covered by several large rocks, and I had been informed, in no uncertain terms, that the storm cellar was off limits, a dangerous den of snakes, spiders, and other crawly monsters. I later learned my grandmother had stored food and canned goods in it–and there were several rotting shelves along one wall–but this inaugural introduction was in total darkness. Although I could feel the damp, musty atmosphere, I could see nothing. My Mom, Dad, and I each stood alone in this dense blackness, listening to the wind and rain beating on the tin door.
After a few minutes, my Dad struck a match and lit a cigarette. That’s when I discovered he was stark naked. Regardless of the weather or time of year, he always slept in the nude, and this night was no exception. My Dad seemed unconcerned by his lack of clothing, but my Mom was horrified. “What are you going to do if the house blows away? You won’t have any clothes?” My Dad just kept smoking his Chesterfield, calmly assuring Dorthy there was nothing to worry about. He would find something to wear.
Only many years later did I realize how amusing and revelatory this story really was. I can now imagine my Dad in bed, hearing the storm’s arrival, going outside to look at the sky, and suspecting there was a possibility of a tornado in the heart of tornado alley. And he was right: a tornado did go through one corner of our farm, tearing up several rods of fence west of the farm house. Recognizing the severity of the thunderstorm, he opens up the cellar door, runs back in the house, wakes up my Mom, and tells her to get to the storm cellar. He then runs into my bedroom to rescue a new Go-Getter. While he ignores taking the time to pick up his boots or overalls, he does stop long enough to grab his matches and a pack of cigarettes off a kitchen counter. I prefer to think that if my Dad had been forced to choose between his cigarettes and his son, he would have chosen the latter.
“The soil, it appears, is suited to the seed, for it has sent its radicle downward, and it may now send its shoot upward also with confidence. Why has man rooted himself thus firmly in the earth, but that he may rise in the same proportion into the heavens above?” ~Henry David Thoreau, Walden
As for my early 4-H experiences, no memories have been saved until the following spring when our 4-H club was competing in the Elk County “model meeting” competition. The task of each club was to demonstrate how to conduct a well-organized meeting that followed Robert’s Rules of Order. Included in each model meeting were 2-3 short “talks” by members. In the spring competition for 1956, I was assigned the task of giving a 45-second talk on conservation. Of course, I knew nothing about such matters, but fortunately my father saved me again, with a match again playing a significant role in the narrative.
A couple weeks before I was to instruct other young Kansans about the value of good farming practices, my father handed me a one-page speech, written in pencil on wide-ruled paper, the kind used in my 4th-grade class. My responsibility was to memorize my father’s text, and that’s what I did. When the Saturday morning competition arrived, I was totally focused on remembering the words of my first public speech. My topic was humus. My thesis was that farmers should not burn their fields to remove post-harvest vegetation but should instead till everything back into the soil. To emphasize my point, I had one small prop. A match. At the beginning of the talk I was to hold up the match and warn everyone in the grade school music room–including the judge sitting in the back row–of the unfortunate consequences when farmers burned their fields after harvesting their wheat, corn, and sorghum. Only later did another Go-Getter ask me why I held the match upside down. Indeed, I was so nervous about remembering the order of words that it never occurred to me I would have trouble knowing how to display a match. Fortunately, despite my inept handling of a prop, we won the competition, beating out the 4-H teams from Longton, Moline, and Grenola.
“A real gardener is not a man who cultivates flowers; he is a man who cultivates the soil . . . . If he came into the Garden of Eden he would sniff excitedly and say: ‘Good Lord, what humus!’” ~Karl Capek, The Gardener’s Year
I don’t recall we ever used store-bought fertilizer in our family’s vegetable garden. The garden shared a fence with the cattle lot where my Dad milked our 8-12 milk cows twice a day. Late in the winter he would shovel a year’s worth of manure into the garden before our Case tractor and plow would till the garden–except for the asparagus patch. It was then my job to start hoeing and raking and smoothing out the soil out so it was ready for planting. We had no compost pile, and I have no recollection how we dealt with leftover vegetation from the previous year’s tomatoes, corn, beans, peppers, etc. Once my talk was over, I don’t recall ever thinking about humus. As a young gardener, my only concern was the action above ground.
Although I no longer have the humus speech my father wrote for me, I suspect it didn’t include anything on the word’s etymological connections with such words as “human,” “humble,” and “humility”–a linguistic web reminding us that humans are products of the soil. As the King James translation of Ecclesiastes confirms, “from dust thou comest, to dust thou shalt return.” My father, an avid reader of the Bible and an attentive observer of his farm, certainly understood that our lives are anchored to the health of the dirt. (And, for what it’s worth, the word dirt derives from an Old Norse word, “drit,” meaning excrement.). It has taken me, however, several decades to catch up with my father’s wisdom, to appreciate how the well-being of the soil depends on the continual replenishment of humus, the organic material infusing the soil with a fresh supply of nutrients and water-retentive properties.
The god of dirt
came up to me many times and said
so many wise and delectable things, I lay
on the grass listening. . . .
~Mary Oliver, “One or Two Things”
Several months before I was hired as the gardener for the Alum Garden, I spent an hour late one afternoon walking around the garden, stopping at various locations to dig up small soil samples with my pocket knife. The soil was consistently gray and compacted, notably lacking in humus. The following spring, my first substantive contribution to the garden was the construction of four cedar compost bins. While I certainly wanted the garden to produce a diverse display of attractive flowers, I felt my primary commitment should be to the soil. A well-designed garden should be a humus factory, and my function was to help this small allotment of the earth produce revitalized soil. With a few exceptions (such as plants with potential pathogens), we would recycle all the vegetative matter we produced inside these garden walls.
To assist the soil-enrichment process, we installed over 1,000 paver bricks to serve as miniature retaining walls around the flower beds. Separating the beds from the gravel walkways, the bricks enabled us to raise the flower beds’ cumulative mass of top soil. In addition to the garden’s self-generated compost, we have in the past four years spread throughout the garden over 35 cubic yards of mulch, eight yards of hard-wood chips, and nine yards of a sand/compost mix primarily intended for the rain garden, the rock/crevice gardens, and several raised beds. In most flower beds, the top soil is now 2-3 inches thicker than it was four years ago. The gray, compacted soil has been replaced–at least at the upper levels–by black, carbon-rich, friable soil.
“The key to restoring soil is to see it not as a substrate in which to grow plants, but as an ecological system for feeding them. We need to feed soil life so it can help feed the plants that feed us. What does soil life eat? Organic matter.”~David Montgomery, “Dirty Business”
While I love working with the soil, it remains for me a mysterious, unknowable world. As Leonardo da Vinci once mused, “We know more about the movement of celestial bodies than about the soil underfoot.” Five hundred years later, his observation still rings true. Virtually everything important happening in the garden is underground, beyond my ken, invisible to my senses. While I’m happily sailing in my boat on the surface of this measureless ocean, most of this subterranean ecosystem is hidden from view. My understanding depends on reading books, scanning articles, Googling resources, collecting facts and insights from scientists and scholars. Here is one example from an essay I read this summer, “The Soil’s Breath” by Tyler Volk, a professor in biology and environmental studies at New York University:
• Organisms living on and within the soil–beetles, worms, and other invertebrate creatures, along with fungi, roots, bacteria and other microbes–produce a ceaseless flow of carbon dioxide as they respire. This flood of colorless and odorless gas, the soil’s breath, enters the atmosphere and annually exceeds, by about six times, the amount of carbon dioxide emitted by all human activities, including the burning of fossil fuels.
• The great exhalation sent from soil to air is key to comprehending the role of soil in the global cycle of carbon. Unlike the simple forms of carbon in the atmosphere (the three-atom carbon dioxide, for instance) and in the ocean (primarily the five-atom bicarbonate ion), most carbon in the soil, derived from living matter, is complex, bound into large molecules (long chairs of cellulose, massive blobs of protein). Taken together, these partly decomposed, jettisoned tissues of life, called humus, are interwoven into the variegated quilt of soil, along with bits of minerals, tiny organisms, gases, and water. The carbon in humus is what makes soil, dark, crumbly, and spongy. Humus, too, gives soil its luscious “earth” aroma.
• As a farmer tills the fields, the soil tends to become warmer and more aerated, which increases the rate of decomposition. On average, soils brought under cultivation lose about a fourth of their carbon pool before settling into a newly steady state. Careful management, on the other hand, can increase carbon retention. Gardeners, for instance, often more than compensate for tilling by adding compost and manure.
I’ve read that one gram of Midwest garden soil might include more than 5,000 species of bacteria, and the total number of bacteria in six tablespoons of soil would exceed the population of all humans on earth. And these numbers don’t include other organisms residing in the Alum Garden soil: fungi, algae, nematodes, earthworms, insects, and an occasional spider. Scientists estimate 90% of the microorganisms in the soil have never been identified.
Despite our limited knowledge, I believe we can on occasion, in moments of grace, sense the dynamics of these mysterious processes and their miraculous results. A description of our situation that has particularly resonated with me is this passage in an essay by Marily Krysl, published in Dirt: A Love Story (University Press of New England, 2015), “Sitting in the dirt, without instruments, we are sentient creatures. Sitting in the dirt, without instruments, we begin to see. . . . From this perspective, everything is as important as everything else. Sitting in the dirt, we are at last in a position to become philosophers.” What better way than to lay aside one’s matches and spend a life sitting in the dirt, the soul being enriched by the creation of humus?