I
am in my garden, squatting in the dirt like a medieval peasant, as
around me rise the complex smells of lichen and mineral, exhalations of
earthworm and beetroot. The job for this day is planting sweet corn by
hand, which means poking each kernel down into its own secret burrow,
each tiny, wrinkled corpse into a solitary tomb, but with hope of
resurrection.
After three rows my nails hold crescents of
soil and my cuticles are torn by serrated grains of earth. Each year I
promise myself I'll treat myself to a little wheeled seeder, which would
do the job more rapidly and less painfully, but there's a benefit to
planting this way: I have a close-up of the soil, on which the seeds'
resurrection depends.
The novelist and agrarian Louis
Bromfield once wrote that our topsoil is America's most precious natural
resource. But it is a humble resource and one we take for granted,
treating it as a lifeless medium for propping up a plant while pumping
it full of nutrients and washing it with pesticides. If we lose our
topsoil to erosion or development, we think we can replace it, bring in a
truckload, dump it, and spread it around.
But it doesn't
really work that way. Topsoil is not so much a substance as it is a
series of complex ecosystems, tiny kingdoms teeming with life, and when
we disrupt it, it ceases to be itself. Imagine a community torn from its
native land, forced into exile in a new world: That's what it means to
move your topsoil. This is why many small growers are transitioning from
plowing and tilling to different methods of cultivation, recognizing
that the topsoil does best when it maintains its own order and culture.
Right
now I'm keeping a close eye on the topsoil in this garden plot because
it has done poorly for two years in a row and I have no idea why. Last
year a third of my peppers succumbed to blight, and the
cucurbits--cucumbers, zucchini, and squash--seemed to wither before they
even emerged. The year before, 50 percent of my onion and garlic
plantings were wiped out by some inexplicable rot. Tiny centipedes
scurried in to devour the dead things, and when I dug into the soil I
would find them almost knotted together, feasting on death. I have to
remind myself that the centipedes are children of God too, horrible
though they seem with their fish-white bellies and all their rippling
legs.
But when I first turned this plot, three years ago,
everything was rich and good. What changed? I put down a lot of organic
matter, which can raise soil acidity, but tests reveal a decent pH. It
ought to be teeming with life. Perhaps it was herbicide drift from my
neighbor's conventionally grown field of genetically modified corn? Or
was there herbicide residue on the straw I mulched with two years ago?
A
scripture passage comes to mind, when the landowner blames the weeds in
his field on some adversary: "An enemy has done this!" I wish I could
so easily accuse some mysterious enemy. But the fact is I do not know.
And here is the paradox of the kind of gardening I do: While we strive
for mastery, we also recognize, with reverence, how impossible it is
truly to control nature.
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