Now that the calendar shows us that spring is right around the corner, it seems fitting to offer some thoughts about America's most popular hobby: gardening.
As we all know, gardening takes many forms, ranging from a single tomato plant growing in a rusting coffee can to experiments growing plants in straw bales or floating in water or climbing up the outside walls of skyscrapers.
Whatever the level of your interest or experience, to garden you need two ingredients: plants and a substance in which to grow them. Since I know very little about gardening in straw bales or water, I'll confine the following discussion to growing plants in good old-fashioned dirt.
Because we humans are a contrary lot, we take perverse pleasure in disagreeing with one another about most everything, from politics to automobile brands to the proper way to cook a pork chop. Gardening is no exception. But in my experience, the key to successful gardening is to pay close attention to old Mother Nature. When we look to see how soil is built, we find two important facts.
One is that, contrary to most everything we ever hear about gardening, there's little or no digging involved! In nature, topsoil stays on top, subsoil stays below. Each offer different foods to the plants which, over the eons, have evolved to make use of them: nutrients from the topsoil, minerals and other elements from the subsoil.
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Two: Soil grows from above. Given the widespread presence of gravity, stuff falls down. Dead leaves, pine needles, heart-attacked chipmunks, waste from the sphincters of soaring hawks, whatever. Things fall, and in the process, with help of bacteria and worms, they make soil.
After spending parts of 50 years hauling various sorts of manure to dig into the raised beds of our garden, my wife and I have changed our ways. Over the past few years we've learned to make our own soil in the form of compost, and then add it every spring to our garden beds.
We start with an enclosure at least 3 or 4 feet square (straw bales, concrete blocks, old wooden pallets, whatever) and lay down a 3- to 5-inch layer of straw (not hay, since hay has so many seeds in it and doesn't let air flow through it like straw does). We top that with a 2- to 4-inch layer of fresh grass clippings, kitchen waste, garden weeds, etc., and then sprinkle a thin (maybe half-inch) layer of dirt atop the clippings (to add some bacteria) and then repeat.
By fall, all the stuff has pretty much decomposed into compost a couple of feet deep, and I put a tarp or tin sheets over it til spring, when I wheelbarrow it over to the garden beds.
An inch or so of decent compost is all you need add each spring to soil that's already reasonably good. Before adding the compost, we aerate the beds with a 2-foot-wide broadfork. After adding the compost, we gently mix it into the existing soil with a three-pronged hoe and then my lovely wife proceeds to do the planting. We use a scuffle hoe to cut weeds off just below ground level, which works for all but tightly rooted things like grasses.
What we've learned through the years is to minimize the pain and to maximize the pleasure. And we all know there are few pleasures greater than to eat healthy food that you've made the effort to grow yourself.
