Buckwheat Flowers

What’s the difference between soil and dirt? My definitions are simple.

• soil – a living organic system filled with life found on the surface of our planet
• dirt – a mostly dead layer of finely ground rocks that covers our planet

Without soil we and the rest of the planet die. Sadly, our modern agricultural practices are destroying soil at an astounding rate. An article in Scientific American estimates that we loose 30 soccer fields of soil EVERY MINUTE! But this post is about building soil, not a diatribe against our modern agriculture practices.

Let’s approach soil from a common sense perspective as opposed to an academic one. First some questions.

What do we expect from soil?

In my opinion we have the right to expect only one thing from the soil. That is to produce our food and other plant based materials like trees and flowers. We use dirt as a foundation for our homes and everything else. Soil is for growing living things and to accomplish that it must be living itself.

What does soil expect from us?

Soil expects us not to kill it. To know how to keep soil healthy you need to know about the composition of soil. Most all soils have roughly the following composition:

Img Src Hawaii.edu
It is that the 5% organic matter (OM) that initiates the life of the soil. It’s a small percentage but it makes all the difference between soil and dirt. This 5% is fragile and it is the portion which we strive to protect and cultivate when we build soil. It is the 5% organic matter and the associated life that follows that transforms dirt into soil.

Healthy Soil is in Balance

Soil is the home to literally thousands of different living organisms. It is an ecosystem by any definition. For plants to gain benefit from a soil this ecosystem must be healthy; it must be in a proper balance. (I prefer the word balance because the mental image of a sensitive balance scale

more accurately depicts the delicacy of the situation.) In rough terms what happens is that each creature in this soil ecosystem contributes to the health/balance of the whole. When that happens there is an abundance of nutrients. oxygen, water, as well as a structural base for the root system available to the growing plants. If the balance is disrupted then the life supply to the plants is disrupted and the plants don’t thrive. They might still grow but they are weakened and susceptible to disease and pests. Thus a vicious cycle often starts. The biggest mistake that farmers make is to directly supplement any missing component of the balance. The operative word here is “directly.” If the soil is missing nitrogen then we should just add nitrogen, right? Wrong. While plants can uptake the added nitrogen directly and appear healthy the soil remains out of balance and continues to decline. (This is one way modern agriculture practices are destroying our soil.)
What we want to do is facilitate the living creatures in the soil correct the nitrogen deficiency. When the living community restores the balance it doesn’t just inject nitrogen into the soil alone. It adds the nitrogen plus a myriad of other components in proportions to achieve and maintain the optimum balance.

I have a strip of soil adjacent to my home. It has been severely abuses in the past in nearly every way you can imagine.

• It first began as fill dirt dredged from a salt marsh
• Home and pool construction added unnatural components like cement, hydrochloric acid and chlorine.
• Next came herbicides, pesticides, fungicides, etc.
• Finally a mono-culture of St. Augustine grass sucked nutrients and returned little.

Then I decided it should become a garden area. This is what I observed.

• Some plants grew OK the first season; collard greens, egg plants, beets did produce
• Some plants would NOT grow or produce at all; squash, tomatoes, beans all failed

Ground cover Planted to Restore Soil Health

So I began to build the soil. It is that adventure that I hope to share with y’all. To keep this post from becoming a book I just wanted to outline the foundation above. In the next two posts I hope to get into the details of:

• How We Kill Our Soil
• How We can Build Our Soil

One more thing needs to be said. EVERY piece of soil is different. It is therefore critical that each one of us carefully observe our own soil. While the principles of restoration are general the particular methods are site specific. What works in Florida will be significantly different from what works in Canada but the principles will be the same.