Here's the Dirt on Food - Part 1

Originally, I was going to focus mainly on permaculture, the design principles as put into practice by my husband and I. We were going to move to a new community and embark on a completely different lifestyle. We re-invested our lives' savings into virgin land. We had the funds to begin, but we were counting on a few more years of good income to fulfill the vision, but the local economy had other plans. So here we are, older and wiser - and still carrying on.

This is The Soil Food Web

This community of gazillions of micro-organisms live under our feet, as unaware of us as we are of them. They can survive without humans, but we can not survive without the Soil Food Web

The real Garden of Eden story

Our ancestors survived by hunting other creatures and gathering fruits, nuts, leaves and roots. We foraged exactly like the other animals in a self-sustaining ecosystem we were told was created for us - as long as we followed the advice of the Creator. When our numbers grew too large to keep doing this, we learned how to drop a seed into a dimple in the earth and sprinkle water on it. We learned how to save seed for the next year and how to turn other seeds into flours to eat with game when the ground was frozen. That worked ok for the next ten thousand years.

Where we began to go wrong

As our brains got bigger and our tools more efficient, something bad happened. We left the garden in the hands of a few and went off to do greater things, like building empires. The soil became depleted of certain nutrients by planting the same thing in the same place. Land was prepared for seeding by tilling, which further hastened infertility by killing a lot of beings living there. Topsoil was treated with chemical weed killers and fertilizers which destroyed even more biological life.

What we forgot to remember

We could have created multiple Gardens of Eden, using the same model, outside of the one we left. Why we did not is in our history books under the heading of Growth.

Now that we are where we are, everyone is saying somebody should do something. Perhaps everyone needs to do something. I believe there is no better way than if we all build Gardens of Eden; self-sustaining ecosystems where each one of us gets to be a care-taker again. The good news is our brains are bigger, so we can do this, as long as we work with other species, instead of killing them.

What a garden needs to be self-sustaining

We learned in science class that plants need sunshine and water to kick off the carbon/oxygen cycle we call photosynthesis. That's the chemistry of it. What I don't remember learning is the biology of it; how the micro-organisms interact with the plants to kick off the carbon/nitrogen cycle - The Soil Food Web.

Basically what happens is each needs something the other has; little critters (ie. bacteria, fungi and nematodes) need to eat carbon/nitrogen compounds off the roots of the plant. The plant needs minerals deep in sub-soils it roots cannot reach. So they trade. As bigger critters come along to eat the littler critters their manure (I love talking shit) and dead bodies create organic matter (humus, not hummus) containing a variety of other compounds that the plant takes up through its roots.

Ya-ya, but how does all this affect my carrot?

I hope I haven't lost you, Dear Reader with the set-up to where I am going with this. All should become clear in the next post.