The delightful weather of spring has lured me back home to Pennsylvania this weekend. I had some major improvements in mind for the suburban garden. So bright and early Saturday morning my father and I got to work. I chipped away at the hard clay soil of the lawn with the trusty shovel. The goal of the effort was to create 2 additional semi-raised beds for the garden. Reclaiming agricultural land from the standard suburban lawn has always been a tedious task, and before long my arms and back were straining due to the sheer human effort. The lawn soil was of course devastated by the repetitive use of the same type of grass along with harsh chemical fertilizers/pesticides. It was hard and yellow, almost like clay. To add to the difficulties, we live in a region of rocky soils. So the clay soil was filled with egg sized stones which had to be removed by hand! After a while, the old rhythms of garden bed creation took over. I shoveled out pieces of lawn grass in a row and removed the underlying earth to form a foot deep trough. After which I stamped down the pieces of turf upside down along the spine of the trough. Finally, the entire row was filled with the removed dirt. The upside down turf serves as an initial nutrient layer to improve the hard yellow soil. For each row of cleared turf, I also added in several pounds of composted leaf molds to further increase the soil's organic content. Some 3 hours of hard manual labor transpired, but eventually I was finished, and exhausted by the effort.
Meanwhile, my father was busy spreading out the compost upon the 4 existing garden beds. Each bed recieved roughly 20 lbs of rich black compost. Since we have deposited at least 40 lbs of fish guts into our piles over the last year, the resultant compost was especially rich. It had a thick, semi-sticky consistency, quite like some sort of petroleum product in fact. Fertilizing the fields required him to manually roto-till the compost into each of the existing beds. Every last bit of the compost was worked into the soil, nothing is wasted around our little garden. Along with the compost, some leaf molds and a small amount of pine needles were also worked into the earth. The leaf mold serves as a good source of carbon to aerate the soil, while the pine needle gave the soil PH a slight kick towards the acidic spectrum. I figure we needed to put some more natural acidic fertlizer into our beds due to harvesting over 200 lbs of tomatos out those same beds.
As we worked, I could not help but feel that we are but following in the foot steps of a hundred generations of farmers before us. A food-producing tradition that has spanned a journey across continents and millennia. What is surprising to me is not that we are personally farming the land as our ancestors have done before us. Rather the surprise comes from the fact that most of my(and my father's) generation would be the first people in all of human history to NOT produce our own food. We are the first broken link within this continuous chain of tradition that stretches back thousands of years. Thus it may be the case that producing one's own sustenance locally is a norm in human history, while our current long-distance consumerist way of life is merely a brief exception. A single broken link in an otherwise flawless chain.
The delightful weather of spring has lured me back home to Pennsylvania this weekend. I had some major improvements in mind for the suburban garden. So bright and early Saturday morning my father and I got to work. I chipped away at the hard clay soil of the lawn with the trusty shovel. The goal of the effort was to create 2 additional semi-raised beds for the garden. Reclaiming agricultural land from the standard suburban lawn has always been a tedious task, and before long my arms and back were straining due to the sheer human effort. The lawn soil was of course devastated by the repetitive use of the same type of grass along with harsh chemical fertilizers/pesticides. It was hard and yellow, almost like clay. To add to the difficulties, we live in a region of rocky soils. So the clay soil was filled with egg sized stones which had to be removed by hand! After a while, the old rhythms of garden bed creation took over. I shoveled out pieces of lawn grass in a row and removed the underlying earth to form a foot deep trough. After which I stamped down the pieces of turf upside down along the spine of the trough. Finally, the entire row was filled with the removed dirt. The upside down turf serves as an initial nutrient layer to improve the hard yellow soil. For each row of cleared turf, I also added in several pounds of composted leaf molds to further increase the soil's organic content. Some 3 hours of hard manual labor transpired, but eventually I was finished, and exhausted by the effort.
Meanwhile, my father was busy spreading out the compost upon the 4 existing garden beds. Each bed recieved roughly 20 lbs of rich black compost. Since we have deposited at least 40 lbs of fish guts into our piles over the last year, the resultant compost was especially rich. It had a thick, semi-sticky consistency, quite like some sort of petroleum product in fact. Fertilizing the fields required him to manually roto-till the compost into each of the existing beds. Every last bit of the compost was worked into the soil, nothing is wasted around our little garden. Along with the compost, some leaf molds and a small amount of pine needles were also worked into the earth. The leaf mold serves as a good source of carbon to aerate the soil, while the pine needle gave the soil PH a slight kick towards the acidic spectrum. I figure we needed to put some more natural acidic fertlizer into our beds due to harvesting over 200 lbs of tomatos out those same beds.
As we worked, I could not help but feel that we are but following in the foot steps of a hundred generations of farmers before us. A food-producing tradition that has spanned a journey across continents and millennia. What is surprising to me is not that we are personally farming the land as our ancestors have done before us. Rather the surprise comes from the fact that most of my(and my father's) generation would be the first people in all of human history to NOT produce our own food. We are the first broken link within this continuous chain of tradition that stretches back thousands of years. Thus it may be the case that producing one's own sustenance locally is a norm in human history, while our current long-distance consumerist way of life is merely a brief exception. A single broken link in an otherwise flawless chain.
1 comment:
As we worked, I could not help but feel that we are but following in the foot steps of a hundred generations of farmers before us. A food-producing tradition that has spanned a journey across continents and millennia.
Too right! I feel the same when I toil on my little Irish plot of land. I bought a small field adjacent to my house and we're busy building a pond for the frogs, and planting an apple orchard.
Post a Comment