Soil is as active as a seed

Moist, rich, friable soil is a must for seed germination.  Inexperienced gardeners ofter consider soil only a passive medium designed to prop a seed in place as it grows.  But soil is an active partners in the garden.  Isaiah in the Old Testament describes the relationship accurately when he says that soil “causes what is sown to spring up.”  He understood that soil is as active as a seed.  Soil doesn’t just hold a seed gently as it transforms itself into new life; soil is a working collaborator in the process. 

Eleanor Perenyi says that rich garden soil looks like devil’s food cake.  It is moist, dark, and crumbly. In Green Thoughts: A Writer in the Garden, Ms. Perenyi reports she maintained her Stonington garden soil with cow manure, seaweed, and a little bone meal.  She also added copious amount of compost.  She points out that in her garden’s heyday, post World War II, “composting was a hobby for cranks.”

Now, Stonington holds compost in much higher esteem.  I haul hundreds of buckets of the stuff to my garden each year.  This is not just dead leaves eaten and turned black by bacteria.  Each bucket is a micro-community. 

Compost constantly adjusts its population.  Bacteria move in as a pile heats up, then die and bury themselves.  As decomposition continues, large chunks of leaves break down into smaller bits.  As the pile cools off, it becomes hospitable to other good neighbors: molds, mites, grubs, and spiders.  Compost also welcomes earthworms. 

You could say that the presence or absence of earthworms defines good garden soil.  If there is sufficient compost and moisture for earthworms, there is sufficient nutrition for plants.  Worms are blind, tubular eating machines.  In their constant process of digestion, compost goes in one end of a worm and comes out the other. The discharge is politely called “worm castings.” Passing through the worm’s gut, compost is concentrated, enriched and well mixed. This is a plant’s best fertilizer.  Scientists estimate that worm castings contain five times more nitrogen, seven times more available phosphorus, and eleven times more potash than is found in average topsoil.  And a worm “casts” a lot, creating its own weight in waste each day. 

Amy Stewart, one of my favorite authors, wrote The Earth Moved: On the Remarkabel Achievements of Earthworms. In it she details a twenty-year experiment by Charles Darwin in which he studied how worms transformed the soil on his home farm in England.