All the leaves are Brown - Part I

and the soil is black

Composting - what’s the actual point

From my Permaculture Design Course days, I remember sitting in a lecture and a staggering fact jumping up and slapping me in the face. Maybe it was the Salmon of Knowledge himself jumping up to slap me out of my ignorance.

I’ll share that very fact with you now.

Silver-blue noctilucent clouds are shown extending far above the orange-coloured troposphere, the lowest and densest part of Earth's atmosphere.

Were you aware that the top layer of soil…the stuff we actually need to grow plant life, is only 30 cm deep?

I find that breathtaking.

It’s like looking up at the sky and realising there’s an ocean of atmosphere that you can survive in which peters out a mere 10 miles above your head.

Imagine an apple as the earth…peel off the skin and you’ll have in your hands all the soil that supports 95% of our food system.

Topsoil - What is it Good for…Absolutely Everything!

A slightly more depressing fact is learning that this topsoil is being eroded faster than it’s being replaced in most parts of the world.

Soil is being lost at between 10 and 40 times the rate at which it can be naturally replenished.

Interestingly, inner city allotments can have more, and better-quality, soils, than our rural farmlands. It’s all to do with how these spaces are managed…or often mismanaged.

Why this isn’t taught in schools is anyone’s guess, but when I look around it seems like we’re more interested in getting the dirt on celebrities and the low-down on getting filthy rich than we are in actual dirt.

This is how we know that soil growth is actually part of our personal growth…when we see soil growth across the globe we’ll know that humanity is also maturing.

Numbers

I’m not a numbers guy. They make me drift off somewhere across the fields, but some statistics are hard to ignore.

Like this one…

When soil quality is poor, as much as ninety-six per cent of the energy captured by a plant is focused on soil regeneration!

As much as 96 per cent of the carbon captured by a plant goes into the soil (this drops to less than half if the soil is in rude health). For comparison, this is how much of my birthday cake I like to keep to myself.

When the soil is healthy, over half of the energy can be allocated to actual plant growth, but when the soil is questionable, almost all the energy is being shuttled to its microbial friends in the soil.

Imagine giving 96% of your paycheck away each month! You’d want a bloody good reason!

I’m putting this in here as part of my vision board for my own garden. Do you use visioning? I’m pretty pants at it usually.

Soil Health - Are we simply adding nutrients?

If microbes are so important to plants, and they clearly are, the question becomes…

• What biology do I need?

That’s a very different question to the one gardeners, and even more so, farmers, have traditionally asked…

• What fertilizers do I add?

Microbe Farming

With this information, our perspective as ‘Compost farmers’, shifts from one of simply providing nutrients to one of cultivating a haven for microbes. It’s the microscopic, and not so microscopic, creatures alive in the soil that do all the jobs that keep a plant healthy & happy.

Whether it’s fixing nitrogen in the soil, hormone production, or organic matter decomposition these microbes are working hard so that the plants don’t have to. It’s a mutually beneficial arrangement.

…fungal diversity determines plant biodiversity, ecosystem variability, and productivity. (van der Heijden et al., 1998; Wagg et al., 2014).

Browns & Greens

Looking after microbes is about learning about microbes…at least some on the most basic level.

We know some microbes love oxygen, whilst others can’t survive in oxygen. If you’ve ever deep-dived into fermenting your own foods you’ll know that some ferments, like sauerkraut, require submerging in liquid to keep the air out, whilst others, like water kefir, need exposure to air.

If you’re a gardener you’ll already know about oxygen because of that niggly feeling that you really should’ve turned your compost over to get more air in…but you didn’t and now you have a slimy heap at the bottom of your garden. But that’s OK, even slimy heaps sort themselves out eventually. You may have just forfeited some carbon going into the soil having escaped as gasses.

As well as oxygen we know that composting microbes love damp environments…just like Goldilocks though it needs to be not too much and not too little. Not too wet, and not too dry.

Once we’ve got a handle on the importance of AIR and MOISTURE we can turn our attention to the home of microbes; CARBON & NITROGEN.

Carbon and Nitrogen are colloquially referred to as Browns & Greens which is a helpful way to think about it but also too simplistic and can lead us astray slightly.

I’ll be talking about all things, Brown & Green in a future second part of this post.

Before we get to the slightly more technical stuff, I just thought it was useful to couch our soil story in our shared human story.

I hope you find my words heartwarming and less scary than a lot of the current framing of our environmental challenges.

As ‘environmentalists’ we run the risk of sounding like crazy people when we point out a lot of the disconnect but we can hold our facts softly as one friend reminded me lately, and simply choose to stay true to ourselves.

So, what’s your next first step?

My invitation is to Start close in.

Start where you’re at;

• what time do you have for soil regeneration?

• what resources do you have to hand?

• Who are the people in your life that would love to get on board with these zany ideas about saving the world, *1Billion microbes at a time?

Good luck.

*In soils, one teaspoon of topsoil contains around 1 billion individual microscopic cells

Personal Reflection

I can’t help but see parallels when I consider the whole interconnected nature of Soil Health and my own personal health journey.

For those not aware, I’m getting first-hand information on what it means to live with chronic fatigue (aka Long Covid aka Post Viral Fatigue aka a million other names that no bugger really has a handle on).

The two most profound shifts towards a healthier version of me were;

1. When I looked into an anti-histamine diet and pulled out the things that were activating a danger-response in my body.

2. And two, when I vastly broadened the diversity of the things I was consuming. Not just eating for nutrients (carbs, fats, proteins) or even micronutrients (vitamins and minerals), but eating for the whole interconnected web that supports human health.

With technocrats and scientists at the helm, the only answers we have are technological ones.

I guess whether it’s Earth health or human health it’s a less mechanistic and more holistic approach that we need.