The Life and Times of R.W. Kale (pt. 1: Birth)

"Huh. What do ya know. They look like little magic 8-balls."

I wondered if this thought ran through all great gardeners’ minds when they opened their first seed pack. Had to be. The label said RED WINTER KALE but I was skeptical. Kale is green. This seed is... definitely black. As I plucked a seed out of the package, I paused for a moment and peered closely at the small, round piece of nature that almost disappeared in the crease of my palm. It was staggering to comprehend the amount of mystery that this tiny black seed afforded my mind. Where did this seed come from? Was I truly supposed to believe that this little speck was going to grow into the lush, green salad that I saw in the produce section of the grocery store? That is what I am told.

As I dropped a single seed into each of the one-inch square soil blocks in greenhouse tray, my mind continued to swirl. These seeds had lived together inside a little paper package for close to a year with no change in appearance, no growth, no activity. But by simply being in contact with a small piece of soil, this tiny round seed is supposed to blossom into life. That is what I am told. I am supposed to suspend my reason for the moment and simply trust in a process of which I have no understanding. That is what I am told.

So for now I wait.

…and wait.

I don’t understand it. What was it about the soil and the sunlight that caused such a dramatic change? A few short days ago, I held a tight-knit crowd of dry, round spheres in my palm. Now, in the place of each of those seemingly lifeless specks I see two bright green leaves bursting forth from the soil. I do not understand how this happened, but this is what I see. How did this soil, created from the death of so many other plants prompt this new life to come up? I’m sure there is a comprehensive scientific explanation for this phenomenon but, at this moment in time, I am content to be mystified.

If there are any spiritual or personal analogies to be drawn from this process, I leave that to you. As for me, I know that I will never see a leaf of Kale the same again.

Peace, love and compost,

-Austin

God made dirt and dirt don't hurt

...but it sure does stink.


This month I've had my first couple experiences turning compost. I'm the new intern-ish person at the garden and I'll be honest, a smelly compost pile is not exactly what I had in mind when I signed up to learn how to grow things. When Justin, Kern and I turned the piles a few weeks ago, they were full of rotting pumpkins, onions and coffee grounds. Since compost can heat up to 180 degrees, the heat produced delicate odors of hot coffee, sauteed onions, and human feces. It should probably be patented into an air freshener scent.

Despite the odiferousness of these piles, they are the perfect place for my garden education to begin. My knowledge is literally growing from the ground up. Soil is the most important component to a successful garden and I'm learning how it is made. We help the process along by putting in the right stuff - veggie and fruit scraps, eggshells, leaves, sticks - and turning the piles to shift things around and help aerate, but most of the work is done by the critters that live in these piles - worms, roly polys, beetles, ants and little microscopic thingies.

This seems to be what gardening is all about - helping along the natural process of growth and development. Our role is not to create, but to cultivate.

To Start: Soil--The Foundation

I would feel I was betraying the sustainable agriculture battle cry of "soil!" if I, myself, did not start by addressing said battle cry.

This entry is to explain one leg on which the McCoy Garden stands: improving soil with human intervention. (more on the other "legs" later...not to keep you hanging though, they are: everyone deserves equal access to fresh, healthy, and locally grown food, and involving youth is the surest way to project and idea of sustainability to the future)

Soil is a moral philosophy. It is alive. We should not kill it, or try to rule over it. We should care, love, work with, and nurture this life. For “organic” or sustainable growers this moral philosophy is all tied to health: of soil, of produce, of environment, and even of man (or woman). Michael Pollan concludes in his reflection on Thoreau in Second Nature that, “Improving the soil improved the man” (71).

Soil is part of the eater’s food chain. Therefore, the health of the soil directly affects the health of the final consumer. Commercial agriculture, reducing soil to three nutrients (nitrogen, potassium, and phosphorous), adding synthetic fertilizers and herbicides made from oil, and emphasizing yield as the only important plant quality, deplete and kill the soil, and reduce nutritional content of the crop.

Thus, we get corn. We get DDT and now Roundup. We get an Iowa farmer who cannot feed him/herself on what he/she grows from the land (all the corn you see when drive down the highway is inedible and must be processed, either by cows and into meat or by machine and into high fructose corn syrup). We get “Western Diseases” emerging right after those Iowa farmers where told to plant corn “fence row to fence row” and “go big or get out” in the late seventies and early eighties. We get childhood diabetes, a disease that used to only be found in adults.

Sustainable agriculture, what the McCoy garden adheres to, respects the mystery of soil by using rich compost to build and feed the soil, and restricts the use of outside inputs. Yes, we have plenty of building and feeding to do; there used to be a building built on top of out site!

Hopefully though, after many years the McCoy garden (and all future gardens under ENCM) will have rich, healthy soil that will produce healthier food so people can live healthier lives in a healthier world.

Now, I should describe the soil in which I work.

As I said the McCoy garden was an abandoned lot, and it once was the location of a building. You might imagine a building sitting on top of soil would compact it greatly. It did, and what I have is clay; you could make ceramics with the stuff! Clay makes it hard for water and air to penetrate the soil and feed the plants. Clay is bad.

Therefore, as a donation, The Mulch Company trucked in a load of compost and a load of pine fines. We promptly shoveled this on top of our clay and planted in it.

Unfortunately, the compost was not finished. Thus, the carbon, which makes up a large portion of compost, is sucking up any available nitrogen to continue the breaking down process. This is unfortunate because finished compost is supposed to make available the nutrients plants need to grow, not hoard them.

My plan is to work on our compost piles and to use nitrogen fixing cover crops to add nitrogen back to the soil—and hopefully break up some of the clay with their roots. By next season we will be well on our way to improving the soil. Already i have noticed lots of worms moving around right below the surface!