PLENTY Spring 2020 Plenty Spring 2020-WEB | Page 27

The soil is the great connector of lives, the source and destination of all. It is the healer and restorer
and resurrector, by which disease passes into health, age into youth, death into life. Without proper
care for it we can have no community, because without proper care for it we can have no life.
~ Wendell Berry
Rebuilding Our Soil
by amanda C ather
W
hen I moved to
Maryland in
August of 2014 after
a decade of farming
in Massachusetts, I
took my daughter,
then 4, out to an
unused pasture to
plant a garden for
the fall. It was hot
and humid but very dry,
and the grass was parched
and dormant after the long
summer. I brought a pitchfork and
spade from the shed and optimistically prepared
to dig a garden bed, only to discover that, no matter
how hard I jumped on the edges of the fork, it would
not penetrate the ground. My daughter and I pushed
aside the grass to look at the soil beneath. It was
red as bricks, hard as baked clay, an alien color and
texture after ten years of building dark, friable soil at
our farm outside of Boston. Our garden was a scraggly
thing that fall, with threadlike scallions and cabbage
plants scarcely bigger than dandelions. We picked the
cilantro we grew, brought the neighbor’s cattle over to
graze the grass that grew more lush with the fall rains,
and tried to learn the ways of our new Penn silt loam
for the coming spring.
The first thing you read in many organic garden-
ing books is almost like a mantra: feed the soil, not
the plant. In order to do that, you test the soil: take a
number of cores from the root zone in your garden or
farm field or pasture, mix them together for a repre-
sentative sample, send it off to your lab of choice and
wait for the fascinating results to be returned. I love
the look and language of soil
tests: phosphorus, potas-
sium, cation exchange
capacity, micronu-
trients, organic
matter—all of these
are keys that un-
lock the mysteries
of trying to create
conditions just right
for a crop to thrive,
organized on a neat report
that bears little resemblance to
the messy, much less accurate day-
to-day of farming or gardening. Fertility budgets,
cover crop plans, nutrient management plans—these
are the tools with which I’ve tried to manage the
health of our soil here on the farm over the past five
seasons, recognizing that I’m walking, quite literally,
in the footsteps of all the many farmers who have
worked this land before me.
I often use the construction of the historic man-
sion on the farm where we live as a semi-arbitrary
marker for thinking about the history of land here.
At that time, the red Piedmont soil was already tired
from generations of the nonstop tobacco farming that
made the owners of the land a fortune, the fertility
and organic matter probably in decline, the ground
probably hard and cracked in dry years, washing away
in rivulets in wet.
By contrast, the records of the bustling farm
owned by John Parke Custis Peter, who built the
manor house around 1830, make your head spin with
diversity by the time of his death in 1848. The farm
was home to pigs, cattle, sheep, chickens, geese,
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