For a long time now, I've been thinking about earth below. The sky above has the romance of sunsets and clouds, and the trees and forests make us write poetry. The creatures that run, fly and hop on the earth charm us, and the plants we grow in our gardens sustain us. But none of that is possible without the dirt on which it all rests - the soil underneath our feet, teeming with microbes, bacteria and a plethora of tiny creatures that enable us to grow all of this. Even in the depths of winter, I imagine all that industry and majesty under my feet.
One of the reasons that I garden is my contempt for mass agriculture as we know it. It's soil management has been appalling - chemical fertilisers have ruined the soils and the depletion of carbon has contributed enormously to climate change, let alone all the fossil fuel that's used to grow and transport the food we eat. The other reason is that I know it helps my mental health, and I read this awesome fact once that gut health starts at your fingertips, and that fingers in the soil actually help your gut biome, like there's this exchanged between the earth biome and you. Where do I start and the earth begins? A bit like the chicken and egg riddle, I guess. So out in the garden, for me, is oneness, and that feels magical to me.
But I don't know a lot about the dirt I'm digging up and trying to nourish and planting in every day - the soil that gives life to trees, that contains bugs and bacteria and nourishes the vegetables and herbs I'm tending. I know that it's important, but I wanted to know more.
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I've been meaning to get around to reading Matthew Evan's 'Soil' for a while - it's doing the rounds of permaculture circles of course, but also agriculture circles that are looking at alternative ways to think about soil. Having subscribed to Audible some time ago, I've been listening to podcasts in the garden as I work, a way to digest information and be inspired and create at the same time. Weeding this week, I got a chance to start the book and I'm already hooked.
From the review on Booktopia:
What we do to the soil, we do to ourselves.
Soil is the unlikely story of our most maligned resource as swashbuckling hero. A saga of bombs, ice ages and civilisations falling. Of ancient hunger, modern sicknesses and gastronomic delight. It features poison gas, climate collapse and a mind-blowing explanation of how rain is formed.
For too long, we've not only neglected the land beneath us, we've squandered and debased it, by over-clearing, over-grazing and over-ploughing. But if we want our food to nourish us, and to ensure our planet's long-term health, we need to understand how soil works - how it's made, how it's lost, and how it can be repaired.
In this ode to the thin veneer of Earth that gifts us life, commentator and farmer Matthew Evans shows us that what we do in our backyards, on our farms, and what we put on our dinner tables really matters, and can be a source of hope.
Isn't it time we stopped treating the ground beneath our feet like dirt?
I love that - 'treating the ground beneath our feet like dirt' - it's a line he uses at the beginning. He rightly talks about how we don't treat farmers and gardeners with the reverence they deserve, considering they put food on our plate. Permaculturists and home gardeners are seen as eccentric hobbyists or merely retirees with nothing better to do - but yet they are truly up close and personal with the thing that really, really matters to all life on earth - soil.
I'm in the early pages of the book, but I'm looking forward to listening to the rest of it. It's beautifully written, passionate and engaging. Evans says he wants it to be a book that gets us to care about soil, and to think about what we can do to nourish soil.
You might like to watch or listen to the interview by Milkwood, a Tasmanian company which runs permaculture workshops (I'm about to start their Mushroom Cultivating course, gifted to me for my birthday).
There's also an extract from the book in this article online about the benefits of soil in the climate change debate:
Soil isn’t some innocent bystander in the climate change debate. It contains all the elements that make up the most important greenhouse gases: the carbon and hydrogen in methane; the carbon and oxygen in carbon dioxide; and the nitrogen and oxygen in another highly warming greenhouse gas, nitrous oxide. Soil can act as either a sink or a source of greenhouse gases. Perhaps surprisingly, the top one metre of the Earth’s crust has way more carbon in it than the air. Soil, with both the living and decomposing lives within it, contains 4.5 times more carbon than the rest of that biosphere put together – including all the plants and animals on Earth. All that carbon was, or still is, the result of living things. In other words, while we often view trees as a carbon sink – a way to store carbon that’s not in the atmosphere – it’s actually soil that is doing the heavy lifting.
The dirt beneath our feet matters to all life on earth. It is, indeed, time to stop treating it like dirt.
What do you know about soil?
What are your tips and tricks to enriching it?
Have you thought about soil in such detail before, or is it just the ground you walk on?
With Love,
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