What happens beneath, in the obscurity of the earth? Mysterious, opaque, familiar yet unknown, ubiquitous and taken for granted, the source of life and the final resting place.
Soil is the living treasure that supports life.
Just a few inches deep where it exists, yet almost all our food comes from it. Every teaspoonful teeming with more organisms than there are humans on earth. It gives us life, yet we treat it like dirt.
Millions of years pass; mountains erode, seas rise and recede, forests grow and fall and still the fertile topsoil, left to its own devices in the forest, jungle+, marsh or prarie is constantly being replenished. No earth is ever exposed and so is not lost but still it remains; the thinnest tissue of life and survives in fragile dynamic balance.
life gives of itself to become the stuff of soil to be taken up by plants and animals to become more life. More forest, more trees, more monkeys or prairie, more buffalo more life. The living skin of Gaea held in place by a net of plants
Nature never allows bare earth to be exposed. as soon as the net is torn or tilled or ploughed it will bleed away, with every fall of rain it gets washed towards the sea. the sun oxidises it, dries and leaches it until the wind blows it away so no plant can take root.
In the Adriatic sea lies the once fertile Kornati islands; their limestone skeletons exposed to the brilliant sun they sit in the blue water like so many heaps of white sugar. little grows except an occasional stunted fig in a hollow where a wisp of soil remains. Yet all over the islands field boundary walls show that once grapes and mulberry and corn was grown. These islands were once part of the fabulously wealthy Dalmatian Republic. Venice lies in the shallow waters of the Po estuary to the northwest, and the magnificent palaces, churches and piazzas are built on pilings of durable Oak and Chestnut wood, whole trees sunk into the soft silt of the delta. These trees came from the mountainsides of the mainland nearby in what is now Croatia.
Once the coast and islands were fertile and temperate the climate gentle and the soil rich and abundant. Here silk worms originally smuggled from far off china were fed on the leaves of the mulberry tree and so much silk was made that ships had sails made of it. But when Venice grew, all the forests on the mountainsides were cut to be foundations of the city, changing the climate. In the winter the cold air fell unimpeded down the bare deforested slopes gathering speed like a runaway train. This “Bora” wind hit the sea and the islands with terrible force, whipping away the light friable soil and scorching the island with salt. Soon nothing could grow.
Trees hold the soil, become it and give it back in a potentially endless cycle
So tread carefully and consciously when you go into the woods. Remember you are a giant. with each step your bodyweight will change the soil, pressing air from the structure, caving in the homes of insects and invertebrates perhaps pushing in seeds and spores to grow, or crushing a woodlouse or spider to become food for micro carrion feeders.
Then, when you have passed, the earthworms and fungal filaments will come and quietly, slowly stitch the rends and tears back together. preparing the soil for roots so the trees can hold earth and air, the fabric of life back together.
Forest soil is more than just a material for plants to grow in. it is a matrix of networks: mycorhyzah conect trees in symbiotic collaboration and via this nerve-like connectivity, mother trees suckle their offspring. Nutrients and sugars are “transmitted and ailing trees are helped and we find that the real “law of the jungle” is not only about competition but includes welfare, nurture and collaboration.
To work in service to the Soil is a high calling and to aspire to be a soil builder is a craft such as vintner, brewer baker or chef. The compost heap is the hearth of the soil builders kitchen; the ingredients are anything that has grown in the soil, or from the soil. The “green”, fresh, high nitrogen material and the “browns “ long dead high carbon things like dead leaves or stalks or sawdust. The right mix of nitrogen rich and carbonacious materials is made asnd then, like a baker or brewer adds yeast to flour or malt, the composter can inoculate the compost heap with a “starter” of selected live organisms or just wait for the everpresent unseen organisms around us to take hold and the wild magic begins. As the old saying goes “compost happens”
The pile soon starts to heat up and as thermophilic organisms in their feeding frenzy bring the temperature up to as high as 77c ,not many weeds or pathogens can cope with that heat for long. Even just a pile of grass clippings can heat up, sometimes in less than an hour. try it next time you cut the lawn, put your hand into the pile and feel the animal like “live heat”.at its heart.
Open up a hot, “working” heap and you will find the material blackened with grey ash-like dust as if burnt: a biological fire. The compost beasties are fevered and need air just as a fire needs draught but it also, like a running animal, needs water,.
As the fire of transformation burns, so the heap settles and the fever reduces, until the compostor turns the pile, introducing more air and mixing the ingredients to heat up again.
Eventually the thermophiles have consumed all of what they need, they have done their job of prepareing the material for the next organism in the succsession and become food for the next critters and so, on each new making, the next traunch of carbohydrates available, digesting and being digested. Then the worms move in; tunnelling, areating, eating , excreting, mixing. even the mucus from their bodies is a super nutriant and gradually this super -intensive, ultra consentrated environment stabilises to become sweet smelling humus full of vitality and possilbility; the foundation of life. mysterious, essential, yet made of waste. In our gardens we can play at what nature does all around us.
The Woodlander 