PREPARING THE SOIL

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Just as a good singer, no matter how experienced, continues to practice the scales, so a good gardener should give thought again and again to the fundamental principles.

By Walker Abel and MOTHER's staff

It wasn't that long ago that farmers were called sodbusters—a term derogatory to people who worked with the soil. Today, however, more and more men and women seem to be eager to get out and bust some very special bits of sod—their home gardens.

At MOTHER's Eco-Village, we look forward to that moment in spring when the soil has warmed and dried enough to allow digging to begin. From then on until early summer, our backs will bend and our sweat will flow as the earth beneath us is lifted, tilthed, and reawakened to its full life.

This year, though, before beginning to break ground, let's pause for a few minutes and review the basic reasons and techniques for preparing the soil. This article will be of special interest to people with new gardens, but it should prove useful for experienced growers tending years-old plots, as well.

Let's begin, then, with the "root" word . . .

CULTIVATION

Usually, we think of garden cultivation in terms of plowing, tilling, digging, or hoeing—that is, simply turning and loosening the soil. This is accurate as far as it goes, but there's much more implied by the word cul tivation, and no doubt the farmers of old intended for these additional meanings to be understood when they chose this term to describe their practices.

If a teacher stands before a class and says, "In this school, we cultivate the characters of young men and women," that person is stating his or her intent to nurture, refine, and improve the students' basic natures. These meanings are equally applicable in the garden. The full intention of soil cultivation is to nurture and improve the ground so that crops will grow better. And just as the teacher who cultivates character must know what attributes he or she wants the students to gain, so must the gardener have a clear image of what he or she hopes to achieve by working the soil.

For the organic grower, that image has two central aspects: The soil should be loose, friable, and evenly textured . . . and the life it contains should be fully encouraged and nurtured.

PART 1: SOIL TEXTURE

It's said that the early Greeks began their transition to agriculture when they observed that plants grew particularly well in the loosened soil of a landslide. That was the example in nature that they tried to imitate with their digging and planting. (Nature also texturizes soil through the action of glaciers, frost, wind, earthworms, gophers, moles, the probing of deep-rooted plants, and so on.) Whatever model you follow with your own ground-disturbing activities, you'll be striving to loosen the soil to a good depth and create an even texture in its upper inches. Such cultivation—in the narrow sense of the word—performs several important functions:

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