Growing Soil

Black turtles beans harvested in fall 2013

"We have a new compost pile," my husband Jim called out to our neighbor Tom as Tom came over with a gift of kitchen scraps and yard waste to add to the endeavors.

The fact that we had a new compost pile was almost news to me but in some ways no surprise.

For the past three years, Jim and I have been growing food in our backyard, and have gotten to a point where about 80 percent of what we eat year round comes from our gardens. I am quite proud and pleased by this accomplishment. Jim is, as well. But what really lights his face up is not the fact that he is growing food but rather soil.

"For the first time in at least seventy years," he proclaimed over dinner, "someone is actually growing soil on this land instead of depleting it."

Growing soil is an interesting side benefit of growing food, if you're growing your food in an organic, sustainable manner. There are multitudes of nitty-gritty details that I don't fully understand, but the basic premise is fairly simple: What you grow can nourish or deplete soil depending on what else is in the soil, and the more you contribute new organic matter to the soil, the better, more alive, and more healthy it will be over the long haul.

Compost creators; though the eggs taste good, too

The history of our land also is a bit a of a fuzzy store to me, but the general outline is as follows: Our house was built probably in the 1840s as a sort of farmhouse. Back in the day all of the land surrounding our current three-acre lot was attached to the house. The land was farmed for a number of years and used to herd dairy at some point. Some time after World War II, farming on the land stopped. The land started to be sub-divided and the house, instead of being transferred from one owner to another via inheritance, was bought and sold repeatedly on the real estate market. Growing food became a pleasant pastime called gardening, and things like "golf course lawns" came to be seen as more important than growing food. Over the decades, the soil got sandier and drier, and lost all of the healthy nutrients it once had possessed. By the time we moved into the house in 2011, very little land that looked like viable gardening space remained. The worst ravage to the land had occurred, in fact, just one or two years earlier when a teenage boy used a tractor to dig up the land and create a massive race track for the dirt bikes that the teens of this area favor.

The dirt bike was impressive -- in a way. It took up about half of our back yard and contained a series of hills and valleys, and six turns. Everything that was once alive around it had been matted down by tires and engine grease to dust. Whatever life the soil might have contained was gone. To make matters worse, the track covered most of the southern and western areas of the yard. The place was optimal for gardening; the soil, sadly, was not.

It was recommended to us that we hire a landscaper -- perhaps even an excavator -- to re-level the land and to cart in fresh soil. This was something we could not afford, and it seemed like it might prove to be an exercise in frustration because all of our neighbors were telling us that nothing could grow on that land -- the soil was too dry and sandy, the weather in the Adirondack foothills too unpredictable, and the insects and the wildlife too plentiful to sustain much of anything in the way of food at all.

These stories struck a familiar chord. In Honolulu in 1995, I had acquired a plot in a community garden that had been neglected for some years. It was full of weeds, particularly an insidious little thing called nut grass that contained a nut-shaped root ball deep below the soil. The root would sprout and re-sprout and new root balls would form. Yet, with encouragement of the other gardeners -- many of whom were locals of Asian ancestries who'd lived in Hawai'i all their lives -- I dug out the root balls and pumped the soil with new life. Hawai'i was so warm that kitchen scraps and rice could be buried directly into the soil, watered, and would break down within weeks. Within three months, basil, tomatoes, Okinawa sweet potatoes, lettuce, and a slew of salad greens were thriving.

The story repeated itself eleven years later when I returned to a home in Seattle that I had purchased with a friend about a year before my largely unplanned move to Hawai'i. I had started a raised bed of flowers, mint, and other herbs in the front and had a small but viable vegetable garden growing in the back. In 2006, however, all of this appeared non-existent. Wild thorny blackberry bushes had overtaken the back yard, dandelion plants were six feet tall, and an ivy that had vined itself fairly harmlessly over a fence had spread over a tree and into the soil literally choking it. Other trash and debris filled the yard, as well. I was told that there was no garden, no soil that could be restored. The only answer was to hire a landscaper and order in several truckloads of new soil. Since I really had no money this time around, I decided to take a slow, Zen garden like approach. I used a small set of pruning shears and spent twenty minutes each morning and evening snipping away at the weeds. My husband -- who is Caucasian, Christian born and suspicious of all things Zen -- watched me and laughed.

The following day, however, I came home to a transformed space. He had adopted my Zen garden approach with the fury of an elephant. With sticks and a heavy rake, he thrashed away at the weeds and vines, creating a pile of yard debris that, once re-discovered, went into the compost bin I had created a decade earlier. After three days of this furious activity, he pronounced success: he had found the garden I had dug and it had soil. Unusually rich soil, as it turned out, because it had benefited from the years of relative neglect by acquiring nutrition rich fallout from the blackberries, decaying tree bark, and the remains of countless rodents, victims of the neighborhood's band of cats.

We raised food in that soil for three years before a full-time job opportunity brought us to upstate New York. Walking through the race track that decorated our new home's landscape, I had a thought. The track edges and its divides between the various hills and valleys had left behind swathes of dirt-lined pockets, pockets that vaguely looked like raised beds. Could we fill those pockets -- one step at a time -- with topsoil and supplement it with materials like cow, goat, and sheep manure?

The potato harvest

For several local farmers, the answer was, "of course." A friend of a local contractor sold us several tons of sheep manure, and a couple who raised goats were more than happy to give us all the manure we wanted as long as we were willing to haul it away ourselves. My husband no longer had a need to destroy; he set out to create. In the first year, we raised tomatoes, peas, beans, cucumbers, too much zucchini, and enough potatoes to last us through most of the winter.

The experiment transformed the race track into what we dubbed the garden circle. In the next year, we continued to fill it with new soil and manure. All the while, we were planting and creating soil from the multitudes of weeds, grass, leaves, and kitchen scraps that were overflowing in our compost pile. By the end of the third year, we were reaping more food than we could eat alone. We evolved into canners, preservers, and donators of our abundance to others.

As year four unfolds, our gardens fill not only the space that used to be the race track but also a huge swatch of land to the east of it and a sizable chunk of our front yard. Our original compost heap has migrated from its space in the center of the yard behind a defunct milk shed to one of the old valleys of the track. It is taller and wider than the track, and it is full of life. Over the old heap are growing several varieties of winter squash, zucchini (which we welcomed back into our lives this year), and a multiplying number of sunflowers smiling and bobbing with the breeze.

The secrets to our success are many. We work our butts off. Our bodies and our clothes are often caked with dirt, and it takes copious amounts of chocolate each night to heal the sting of mosquito bites and the snags and thorns of unwanted weeds that plague us daily. The fresh and continual supply of garden-fresh vegetables and fruits that our fields yield more than compensate for the pain. But we both know that beneath this very rich reward of good healthful food and clean living in a very dirty way is the fact that every time we plant and nurture a seed to life we are helping to create new soil. Our years of living in Hawai'i taught us the value of the phrase Malama 'aina: care for and nurturing of the land. We do our best to carry out this mission every day.