The Homestead Gardener-Loosening the soil; loving the land
by Derrick Gentry –
The Clearing
Midwinter spring is its own season, as the saying goes. The sun shines brighter and longer, and our spirits rise up like the sap in a maple tree. The snow melt and the ground thaw then reveal to us a world of mud that checks our aspirations and brings our spirits back to earth. If one is a gardener, it is a tragic mix of high hopes and heavy boots. For the soil is unworkable at the very moment when you most want to work it. You can’t even get in there to inspect it, because the wet Spring soil is the most vulnerable to compacting.
Midwinter spring presents a false hope, or at least a premature hope: the end of one season while another is struggling to be born. It also gives us a reminder of our ancestral guilt, which we might as well meditate upon (since we are stuck in the mud and have nothing else really to do).
… In the beginning, long ago, all we wanted was some light and some air. And so we cut down some trees to open things up and plant our crops and gardens. This was in the pre-Lorax pioneer days, when our minds were guided by a different myth. In those days, when the fish jostled in the undammed rivers, a thick layer of rich and friable topsoil lay upon much of the land: built up in some places by the seasonal deposits of leaf litter falling from old growth trees, and on prairie land by the steady amendment of grass-fed manure. This layer of fertile soil was held in place by the roots and the cover of the plants that grew in it.
And then we made our clearing. We thereby made our historic leap from a life of hunting and gathering, to farming and tilling the now-exposed soil on our vast tracts of cleared land. And in many places, within a very short time, that topsoil was depleted of its fertility and washed away into the bottoms of the (by then) much less crowded lakes and rivers. We were left with wide open spaces and heavy, heavy clay. Having transplanted the remaining trees to the tree museum, we then paved paradise and put up a parking lot — in part, I think, to erase the shame of our reckless clearing. But mostly it was to cover up the mud.
How to build soil (and battle heavy clay)
Now, amid the shrill cries of the red-wing blackbird, we hear the chant of the gardener’s lament in Springtime: “I cannot work the soil because it is heavy clay….”; or, in our more hyperbolic moments: “I cannot have a garden because it is all heavy clay!”
Building good humus soil takes time. You either have it, or you don’t, or you are working patiently to get there. The conquering, pioneer spirit is still in us when it comes to heavy clay. But there is no winning in the frontal attack on heavy clay; working the soil too early will destroy the soil structure, and tilling it even at the better times of the year will disrupt and destroy the microbial life that will do most of the soil building for us if we create the right conditions for it.
Raised beds are a fine modern idea. But unless you want to haul in load after load of peat moss and mushroom compost, a raised bed is not so much a solution as the framework for a solution. With raised beds, we still need to build and loosen the compacted clay and hard pan down below in order to allow for proper drainage and aeration. The idea of a raised bed is to build up while building down.
Before we address it as a problem, let us say a few necessary words in praise of clay. Yes, clay retains too much water and dries out in all the wrong ways. But unlike sand, clay at least does retain water. Moreover, the microscopic spaces between the clay particles mean that clay soil has a good “Cation Exchange Capacity,” or CEC, an important physical/chemical property that facilitates the exchange of nutrients. Clay, therefore, is a key ingredient of healthy soil.
We just don’t want all clay, heavy clay. Our challenge as builders of soil is to incorporate more organic matter and introduce more oxygen down below so that the soil-building microbes can begin to convert that matter into layers of humus. But how we can we facilitate that process without employing traditional methods, such as roto-tilling and double-digging, that commit microbial genocide and destroy what we are trying to build?
There is an ideal tool for the job: is called a broadfork. The broadfork is the antithesis of the shovel and the hoe and the rototiller, tools that are truly emblematic of back-breaking work. The broadfork does not require one to stoop over or lift heavy shovels full of dug dirt. All you have to do is lift it up, drop its series of 12-16-inch tines (mine has 14″) deep into the soil, and rock back and forth with both feet on the bar while standing upright. The photo on this page shows one in use. A broadfork loosens and aerates the soil and breaks up the hardpan without inverting the soil layers and destroying the life of the soil. Along with the smaller and lighter-weight garden fork, the broadfork is perhaps the most important garden tool for the project of building soil. It requires no fuel, and most broadforks made today will last for generations.
Cover crops in the garden bed
Cover crops are another excellent way to do things deep in the soil while avoiding the counter-productive practice of invasive tilling. I have become something of an evangelist for the cause of cover cropping in the small-scale garden. As the name suggests, cover crops are meant for crop fields and larger-scale agriculture. But in my view, cover cropping is just as important for building and maintaining soil in the home garden.
There is a large repertoire of cover crop options that work at different times of the year. I seed buckwheat, for example, repeatedly throughout the summer season (and I will have more to say about buckwheat in the coming months). Cover crops have a special function in the winter and Spring, however. In addition to providing green manure and a living mulch while fixing important plant nutrients, off-season cover crops (such as winter wheat and field peas and oats) perform the important task of taking up excess nutrients between the growing seasons so that they do not leach away in the torrent of snow melt and Spring rains. This preventative measure is particularly important if you live in a watershed region. The notorious algae blooms in our lakes are caused at least in part by the leaching of nutrients from agricultural land (phosphorus being one of the chief culprits).
Cover crops are an excellent way to build soil tilth, adding organic matter and loosening up the soil and opening up compacted heavy clay — all without destructive tillage. Daikon radish, in fact, is also known as “tillage radish” for its ability to drill down several feet into clay and hardpan. I seed daikon radish in late summer and early Fall. It continues to grow until it winter kills at about 15 degrees Fahrenheit. The radishes in the ground decompose in Spring, opening up the soil while depositing organic matter. The open cavities aerate the soil and thereby accelerate the warming up and drying out process in Spring. The cavities also allow for the easy deposit of biochar additive so that it gets down to the root level where it needs to be. (For more on biochar, see the February Homestead Gardener).
I am also fond of hairy vetch, an overwintering cover crop planted in late summer. Vetch is a legume with tap roots that go down deep and loosen up the soil and also fix nitrogen (as do clover and peas). It is a good cover crop to plant following tomatoes or other vegetables that use a lot of nitrogen.
Winter rye is a common go-to for breaking up heavy clay. Rye has a dense root system and grows at a rapid pace in the early months of Spring (having been established late in the Fall). I planted winter rye for the first few winters in our current garden, but more recently I have come prefer the nearly equal benefits of winter wheat. Rye grows a bit too vigorously in the Spring for my taste and is notoriously difficult to till in. Rye is also allelopathic — an anti-social property that is great for controlling early season weeds, but which is also a drawback since you must allow at least three weeks for the rye grass to break down after it is tilled before your Spring planting (to avoid stunting the growth of your desired plants).
Radishes and field peas and oats typically winter kill by January. Vetch and rye and wheat come back in the Spring and require tilling in at the right moment. “Tilling in” with cover crops means shallow tillage at most; you simply want to chop up the green growth above ground and sever the roots just below the surface. Large-scale farmers do this when they disk their cover crops or use a crimper or a flail mower. All a gardener needs, though, is a simple stirrup hoe, rather than a fossil fuel-powered tractor with accessories.
It will take more than one season to loosen up your heavy clay, so be patient. Cover cropping is nevertheless one important long-term strategy for turning that heavy clay into a thick layer of loose and friable soil. And once you have that near-miraculous substance called humus, you will have sponge-like soil with the paradoxical virtues of good water retention and good drainage. And that is the ultimate goal.
Ancestral Guilt, Part Two
Was it all worth it? Can we go back? “The worst mistake in the history of the human race” — that is what the geographer and cultural historian Jared Diamond calls the advent of modern agriculture 10,000 or so years ago.
We now have limited options. A let it be ethic is not one of them. We cannot walk away and let the cleared land go back to its “natural state,” since the pioneer species that fill in the vacuum tend to be invasive species that do not restore the biodiverse ecosystems that we disrupted (at least not in the short term). We cannot go home again; we have to make our home here. These inherited ecosystems now demand our wise stewardship, and that involves the finding of solutions somewhere in the middle. Not everything in the middle is a compromise.
When Europeans first settled in North America, what looked to them like a wilderness was actually in many places a natural environment carefully managed by Native Americans. The Native Americans were not primitive hunter-gatherers; they practiced what anthropologists now call low-impact horticulture, which is close in meaning to that in-between practice of happy sustenance known as gardening.
A few months ago, I came across an old clip on youtube of Ruth Stout, the iconic author of The No-Work Garden. She must have been well into her 80s. The clip shows her casually tossing seed potato on the ground, covering it all with a bit of straw, and walking away. Stout’s no-work garden is a major affront to the past 10,000 years of agriculture, not to mention a thumb of the nose at the pioneer spirit.
Was it worth it? I admit there is a bit of Ruth Stout in me. Part of me resents having to start plants indoors, mostly because of the heating pads and overhead lamps and the things I have to leave plugged in. I am still drawn to the perennials and the self-seeders, to the things that do not need doing as well as the things that do. Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they toil not.
I do love those tomatoes, though. What would a garden be without tomatoes?
