The Bedrock of Gardening: Choosing Soil Over Dirt

How I Used to Garden

I have been gardening for a long time. But I haven’t always been a gardener. For decades I gardened with good intentions. I gardened from the surface, up. I was intrigued and fascinated by plants, but what happened below the ground wasn’t just a mystery, I hardly thought of it at all. If I did it was limited to determining whether it had enough water for the plants to grow, or if it needed rocks removed. I looked at the health of the garden—and my skills as a gardener—predominantly in terms of looks: was the plant foliage nice? Were the flowers pretty? Did different plants and trees combine to make a picture that was pleasing to the eye?

Why We Garden this Way

I don’t think this is unique to me: it’s very easy, in our society, to deal Tpredominantly with the surface of things. So why would messaging about gardening be any different? If you don’t look too hard, the messaging that what grows above the soil is worthy of our focus, and what grows below should be eliminated, is strong. It’s everywhere, and has been for some time. I grew up in the 1970s, and my parents even have over one hundred acres of land, planted in wine grapes and apples, upon which I worked as a child and teen. At age twelve I was down in the ‘dirt,’ every day that summer, hoeing thistles and taping up grapevines. But I can honestly say that other than mentally cursing the ‘dirt’ for holding onto the thistles’ roots so mightily, I didn’t give it a thought. It was there, a kind of anchor. And it was our job to pull the weeds out of it so that the grapevines wouldn’t be smothered. That was it.

What Changed

It wasn’t until 30 years later, when my husband, children and I moved back to my hometown—a suburb outside Seattle—that I began to intuit that not only was the ‘dirt’ not something to forget about, it was in actuality the bedrock, cornerstone, foundation—all the words—of everything else. The health of the dirt was the health of the plants. The health of the plants was the health of all other living creatures, including us. It seemed so glaringly obvious. So simple: take care of the ‘dirt’ and it would take care of everyone else.

How I Learned About Soil

I began a ferocious reading frenzy—books and magazines and scientific and agricultural journals and blogs and podcasts and more books. It was an awakening that was, to me, seismic. I was homeschooling our youngest at the time and we delved deeply into the Dust Bowl: that entirely man-made season of disaster which has not really ever stopped in many states in this country, because our practices haven’t changed: large farms are still tilled. Fields lie fallow for long months. Pesticides and fertilizers are still being pushed on farmers, growers and gardeners by chemical fertilizer companies. The soil, poisoned and disturbed repeatedly for decades, becomes dirt: devoid of the billions of microorganisms, bacteria and mycorrhizal fungi that organic, healthy soil contains. Without life in the soil it becomes just an inert medium. Some farmers and gardeners conclude the only thing to do to get their plants and trees to grow in this dry, dusty medium is to add more chemical fertilizers to it: artificially providing enough nutrients to allow seeds to germinate and plants to grow, but killing off yet more of what made their soil, soil, and now has made it dirt. It’s a vicious, dirty cycle. —When the winds blow across the Great Plains the dirt rises with it: massive storms of stripped dirt whipped up into the sky, and away.

The Beauty of the Tiny

It’s interesting to me that we so often ignore or dismiss those things in our world which we can’t easily see with the naked eye—such as soil microorganisms—and yet we’re also a planet with, according to some, over 4,000 religions, faith groups and denominations. It seems it’s easier for us to believe in the unseen when we feel our afterlife depends upon it. But I think most of us would also support the idea that the quality of our lives here and now matters, too. And what I’ve learned and continue to learn is that ignoring the soil below our feet; pretending that it isn’t, when unspoiled, teeming with beneficial life that allows for the health of all other organisms on earth, is suicide. Suicide of health, suicide of quality of life, and suicide, ultimately, of the complex, intricate and yet elegantly simple and efficient systems of nature. When we treat soil as if it’s dirt, we are treating the earth as if it is Mars—dry, plant-less. Lifeless.

Our Goldilocks Planet

We are so enormously lucky to be on a planet the exact-right distance from our sun, which is the exact right type and size of star. It defies all the odds that our small planet ended up with the right conditions for life. The earth is our gift horse. And we’ve been looking it in its mouth for a long, long time. We cannot continue to garden and farm in ways that kill the soil life and also evade the massive ripple effects of doing so.

But I’m Just a Backyard Gardener

Maybe you have a small back yard, or two raised beds in the parking strip in front of your house or apartment building. Perhaps you have a fenced front yard used mostly for your dogs, or just a strip along one side of your home. Whatever each of our particular gardening situations, the fact that we’re gardening—planting and nurturing plants that draw carbon dioxide out of the air, heavy metals out of the soil, and create oxygen for us to breathe, is a very, very good thing. Instead of focusing on being “just one gardener” we can instead see everyone who gardens as part of a collective. When we view it that way we can see the massive sea change that collectives of gardeners the world over can create. Every time we choose organic growing methods and practices over chemical ones we are allowing the soil to be the sea of life that it is. Life begets life. Every garden, gardened with soil knowledge—whether food, flowers, herbs, trees—is making a true and positive impact upon the earth. When we decide to treat soil as the foundation upon which everything else depends, we become hard-pressed to treat it in any way other than with the care and reverance such a role merits. And that would be the difference between a healthy planet and a sick one; between soil, and dirt.