Dirt!

 Sometimes I just wish our current civilization could start again, all of us beginning as simple humans with simple lives, living as part of the environment, interacting with life around us, learning from it, depending upon it. We need an experiential tutorial about living on earth. After centuries of separation from our roots, learning from our childhood that we are separate and above the rest of nature, it's a hard mindset to change. Feeling separate from nature is in our psyches. It's how most of us have learned to visualize our world. And everything in modern life contradicts the reality that we are just another life form and totally dependent upon the whole. I don't want to caste shame here. Shame is not useful. And this is a worldview that has been developing for thousands of years. It is not my fault or your fault. But we do have to figure out how to change our perceptions of our place in the world. Otherwise we can't survive. It's that simple, unfortunately.

Just like we have a tendency to drive down the road, go into our buildings, live and work in man-made structures and maybe seldom see or even think about the ecosystem we inhabit, we are similarly cut off from the awareness of what's under our feet. In fact, since most of us live in cities and are surrounded with paved landscapes, the appearance of bare land might actually be a bit repellent to us. It gets muddy when it rains. It gets our shoes dirty and we track mud into the house. "Dirty" is a bad word in so many ways. Yet dirt is where we all come from. It's the cradle of life. And the health of the dirt under our feet is incredibly important. It is the birthplace of everything.

Here at Prairie Hill, a few of us are wanting to find out more about our dirt lately. From the beginning of our project, we have wanted to be an example of good ecosystem stewardship. Early-on we received a grant that helped us plant native low-growing grasses around our buildings: buffalo grass and blue gramma. Native plants have much deeper roots, sucking up the rain, keeping it in the soil instead of allowing it to run off. And short native grasses eventually don't need to be mowed, saving on fuel and air pollution. This effort to plant natives was a great idea, but it's not been so easy to achieve success. It takes a long time for these grasses to get established. Years. And in the meantime, other plants try to take over. So we've had years of hand-weeding our lawns, replanting, and scratching our heads. 

Just recently we have begun to envision different patches of taller natives, flowering forbs, that are far enough from our homes for height not to be an issue. We've brainstormed about how to get these new seeds to thrive without the use of herbicides. The Native Turf Helping Circle has been meeting frequently in the last few months, getting ready for new projects around our buildings and on the slope up to our high ground. We're getting poised to be ready once temperatures begin to break. And these meetings are inspiring because we're envisioning beautiful healthy thriving areas all around our community.

One of the things we're studying is our soil. We want to plant the right plants for the soil we have, or amend the soil in whatever way is needed to make it easier for plants to do well. Since this has been a construction site for the past three or four years, our soil has been dug, piled up, and moved around. But we have insisted that our developer save our topsoil in a huge pile in order for us to spread it around after the construction is done. Now that our 10th building is under construction, that pile of topsoil is being moved yet again. But we have our eyes on it. It's a precious commodity! 

In the last post on this blog, I focused on how our planet formed. In the beginning there wasn't dirt at all, just rock. Then water began to grind the rock into small and smaller pieces. The rock that soil comes from is the parent material of the soil. Different parent materials result in soil with different minerals. For instance, limestone is a common parent material, which makes soil rich in calcium. Another kind of soil has spent long-ago time at the bottom of a lake or swamp, and these soils tend to have a high percentage of clay. Volcanoes spew molten rock up from deep inside our earth's mantle. Eventually this hardens and gradually weathers into fertile soil. Rivers, glaciers, wind, and chemicals all work together to make soil out of rock. But good soil has more components than rock.

A healthy soil, one that is supportive to growing plants, has minerals, air, water, organic matter, and a host of organisms. The organisms and microorganisms play an important part in soil development. There's a whole world of life beneath our feet, hidden until we start looking. Earthworms, beetles, bacteria, fungus, ants, spiders....., the list is long. And these small living things transform dead plant and animal material into fertility.  Always soil is being created, but it can also be diminished by the kinds of things we do when we're covering the earth with our buildings and roads. 

As we think about what ground covers might do best in different places around our land here, we take note of things like water retention, organic matter, exposure to the sun, slope, shade and drainage.  On our 8 acres of Prairie Hill land, we have some places that have lots of clay, other places that are more fertile, some places that hold too much water, a steep long hillside in the sun, and areas shaded by buildings. With all these different factors in mind, we're planning on using different kinds of native grasses and forbes for the different areas.

Outside my south door are 13 flats of planted native seed. Most of them are forbes (not grasses) and will have beautiful flowers if they do well. They are covered with straw so that they have some protection from drying out. But they need a couple months of winterizing (stratification) before they will be able to germinate. In a month or two, we might begin to see little sprouts. And by then, we'll have more of an idea of where each variety will do best here at Prairie Hill. We know that these things take time, so we're cultivating patience as well as plants. In a few years, we may have a breathtaking array of native flowers and grasses covering our land here. That is our hope.