Thankfully I’m not alone in this; I don’t have to work from scratch. I may not have enough compost yet to fully amend my own soil, but others have been creating it for years. I just needed to humble myself enough to go down to the local garden supply store and ask for it.
Hubris /
I guess I thought if I had enough information—read enough books, took enough classes, attended enough workshops—that I could accomplish anything I wanted in this garden. Knowledge was power.
And I guess this was the same hubris that led humanity writ large to think they could do whatever they wanted to the land over the years, thinking anything was possible because they had science on their side. Chemistry was power.
Real power, though, lies in the earth itself. All the knowledge and chemistry in the world won’t instantly reverse the soil’s depletion and compaction and render it rich enough to cultivate a lush crop this growing season. That’ll take more hard work, care, and time than I’ve invested thus far.
Earth /
Happy Earth Day 2018, everyone.
I hope we can each do something a little extra nice for the environment today.
And tomorrow. And so on.
Peace.
Mulling /
I thought that in trying to grow my own food this year, I was truly going back to the beginning, the basics of self-sufficiency and the roots of all societies.
Now I think I was wrong. I need to go back further.
To grow food, first you need to grow soil.
Here was my recipe for vegetable life: Collect up swapped seeds, cover them in depleted dirt, douse them with water, and wait as the sun bakes them. But this isn’t enough. All I’ve got is dirty seeds that get damp twice a day and then dry out again every arid afternoon.
What they need is living, breathing soil: lush humus with dark crumbles of decaying organic matter loosely netted together by fungi and roots, aerated by tunneling worms and enriched by nitrogen-fixing bacteria.
I rushed to the part I understood, the part you see in grocery stores. “Land, give me the food I need to live.” I skipped all the care it takes to get there. “Land, here is the nourishment you need to support countless lives in an ever-evolving, ever-growing web, from the microbial to the macroscopic, myself included—eventually.”
Milagro /
The real miracle my garden needs isn’t Miracle-Gro, it’s water. Water, as they say, is life. Although I’ve been thoroughly watering the seeds I planted both morning and night, that moisture barely seems to hold in the ground, and I suspect that dry dirt may be the main issue preventing germination.
I’m not alone. As the Albuquerque Journal reported late last month, virtually the entire state of New Mexico is currently in a state of moderate to extreme drought. Last week Sylvia Rodríguez wrote on the New Mexico Acequia Association’s blog that, “Faced with too little water to irrigate as usual this spring, many acequia officers are currently holding stream wide meetings to talk about how to share and manage the shortages.”
This is a dry region even in the best of years, and water use has been at the heart of both community resilience and contentious conflict for centuries. Hence, for example, the plot of The Milagro Beanfield War, in which haves and have-nots, natives and newcomers, duke it out over whether an individual has the right to irrigate his family’s field.
Since I’m hand-irrigating from the urban water supply rather than a shared acequia or well, no one is challenging my practices. But I’m conscious regardless of how much water I’m using these days, and how much it’s worth in pursuit of a minor miracle.
Miracle /
It’s tempting, waiting anxiously for the miracle that is new life emerging from barren ground, just to reach for a miracle in a bottle. If my soil is too depleted to nourish new seeds, even with the bit of compost and worm castings I tilled in before planting, maybe I should purchase a supplement to help them along.
A bit of research reminds me why I committed not to adding synthetic fertilizer, though.
Chemical Fertilizers
Chemical fertilizers (also called inorganic, synthetic, artificial, or manufactured) have been refined to extract nutrients and bind them in specific ratios with other chemical fillers. These products may be made from petroleum products, rocks, or even organic sources. Some of the chemicals may be naturally occurring, but the difference is that the nutrients in chemical fertilizers are refined to their pure state and stripped of substances that control their availability and breakdown, which rarely occurs in nature.
Advantages of Chemical Fertilizer:
- Since nutrients are available to the plants immediately, improvement occurs in days.
- They are highly analyzed to produce the exact ratio of nutrients desired.
- Standardized labeling makes ratios and chemical sources easy to understand.
- They’re inexpensive.
Disadvantages of Chemical Fertilizer:
- Chemical fertilizers are primarily made from nonrenewable sources, including fossil fuels.
- They grow plants but do nothing to sustain the soil. The fillers do not promote life or soil health, and even packages labeled “complete” do not include the decaying matter necessary to improve soil structure. In fact, chemical fertilizers don’t replace many trace elements that are gradually depleted by repeated crop plantings, resulting in long-term damage to the soil.
- Because the nutrients are readily available, there is a danger of over fertilization. This not only can kill plants but upset the entire ecosystem.
- Chemical fertilizers tend to leach, or filter away from the plants, requiring additional applications.
- Repeated applications may result in a toxic buildup of chemicals such as arsenic, cadmium, and uranium in the soil. These toxic chemicals can eventually make their way into your fruits and vegetables.
- Long-term use of chemical fertilizer can change the soil pH, upset beneficial microbial ecosystems, increase pests, and even contribute to the release of greenhouse gases.
Concerned /
Knowing other farmers who have been doing this longer than her, I can comfortably say that this concern never really goes away—each year after planting time you’ll fret until you start seeing green shoots. No matter how familiar with growing patterns you get, there’s always room for doubt in your mind. (Robin Babb in this week’s Alibi)
Well, that’s reassuring. I mean, I don’t actually feel reassured. But it’s reassuring to know I’m not the only would-be grower who’s concerned.
Powerless /
Supposedly we all have some flower power in us, sure. These days, though I mostly feel helpless when it comes to flowers. Or leaves, or stems, or roots. It’s been two weeks since I began planting seeds in my new garden bed and so far not a single seedling has emerged. Have I failed them all? Did I, as I feared, doom them from the start by putting them in depleted, collapsed soil—compacted mineral silt devoid of nutrients and microorganisms? Sure, I tilled in the sparse grass cover that had mostly dried up over the winter; I buried worm castings around each seed and I’ve been watering faithfully each day. What more could I have done with what I had? What more should I be doing now? Are my seeds growing just beneath the surface and preparing to make their appearance any time now, or has it all gone terribly awry?
Power /
Okay, that’s enough with the violent metaphors. Let’s shift our mindset from firepower back to flower power.
Grenades /
A favorite technique of guerrilla gardeners that I recently had the pleasure of experiencing myself: throwing seed bombs. These are little hand-formed balls of soil and seeds that people can create en masse, then carry with them wherever they go. Most often they contain local wildflower seeds, but anything goes when you’re a guerrilla. In theory you can toss them wherever you see empty land that could benefit from a bit of green—under an overpass, alongside the road, in a vacant lot. Once you lob them grenade-style over a fence (or bury them with more care where possible), they’ve got everything they need to germinate and take over from there as only wildflowers can.
As for me, I’ve yet to interfere with public landscaping. I guess I’m a pacifist, even by gardening standards. But I did get a seed bomb labeled “High Desert Wildflower Mix” at the Albuquerque seed swap a couple months ago, and thoroughly enjoyed tossing it into the yard. The food garden will receive most of my attentions in the months ahead, but won’t it be lovely if wisteria, yucca, prickly pear, and wildflowers come up all around too?