Ideas and Complications

I keep getting side-tracked. This is the time of year when I work out how I will be able to watch the IPL. I know it’s the very busy gardening time, but I do love cricket, especially the IPL. When it first started twelve years ago I chose a team, Kings XI Punjab, and I have followed them ever since. Anyway, it starts on Saturday, and I’ve sorted out the viewing. Yippee! My other diversion this morning was setting up the British Journal of Photography app on my phone. Ten emails later and it’s sorted too. Now time for gardening.

Action

I have seven cubic meters of soil conditioner arriving at the allotment tomorrow.  A very big lorry load.  This soil conditioner is the essential essence of my gardening idea. I’ve been reading about no-dig gardening, or no-till gardening, as it is also known. All the articles talk about weeds, but my plan is not to have weeds. I shall have plants. Some I will harvest, some I will smother with cardboard and soil conditioner. I’ve also been reading about tilth. And edaphon. More about this later. It’s complicated. Also simple. I want to return the soil to a natural state.

Plants

The greenhouse with its little pots of seedlings and growing plants is not exactly natural, but I have to start somewhere. In my mind the allotment and the garden will contain lots of healthy plants and I will be able to harvest all the food I need for the family, and seeds will set and fall and germinate, and the whole thing will be a perfect closed system. But I’m not there yet, and until then I will raise little plants in the greenhouse. The kale and cabbages are all coming up, and the callaloo. And the slow peas, finally.

Other things

I want to talk a little more about edaphon and tilth. I will quote Pauli’s essay about Francé reproduced in a book by Ernest Hennig, The Secrets of Fertile Soils, page 56

The fertility of a soil is the expression and measure of the living standard of plants and edaphon which has been reached, and this is outwardly expressed in the form of crumb structure which is constantly both growing and dying off.

This crumb structure is what gardeners call tilth, which we often produce mechanically, with a rake, and which quickly fades. The real thing, being alive, constantly regenerates.

You and me.

I’m not sure what I’m talking about! I’m finding out. I have a plan and I have a principle – I will not dig – and I want to experiment. I will record here what I do and what happens, and I will keep reading as well, looking things up, accepting ideas, rejecting ideas, learning. I would love this to be a dialogue, so please comment, let me know what you know. I have this Garden of Eden idea. The earth is bountiful, and the soil is her skin, and caring deeply for that skin we can begin to heal her wounds.