Dirt: The Short Version

America Is Made of Dirt

By Robin Ford Wallace

Dirt don’t get no respect.

Forgive our grammar.  This is a subject on which we feel strongly. 

Dirt is literally the basis of horticulture, of the terrestrial food chain, one might say of life itself.  Potatoes grow under it and tomatoes grow above it but everything grows out it.  Gardening is all about:

Dirt.

But do people appreciate it?  No.  They “treat it like dirt.”

Consider the language:  Unscrupulous behavior is referred to as “playing dirty,” and if you engage in it you will “soil” your reputation, causing people to say you have “feet of clay.”  

How did it come about that dirt got “dragged through the mud?”  Perhaps it is because it is plentiful – “as common as dirt.”

So people already walk all over dirt; but the worst slap in dirt’s face comes when, having become enamored of the now-trendy subject of organic gardening, they rush out and pay serious money for sacks of:

Guess what?

A man we know bought $300 of bagged topsoil, poured it into a raised bed built for that purpose, and into it placed his tomato plants – nine inches apart.  When advised they might fare better out in his yard, where they had sufficient room, he said, incredulously:  “But that’s just dirt!”  

“Just dirt,” indeed!  Dirt is a miracle that takes millennia to make.   

Dirt starts when wind and water slowly chip away at rock, breaking it down into smaller particles.  Then air mixes minerals into it.  Plants and animals die and decay in it.   Microbes ferment it.  Worms eat it and excrete it for countless generations.

Finally, ready to support life, does dirt just lie there, waiting to be insulted?  No indeed.  Dirt is on the go.  If dirt is carried and deposited by water, it is called alluvium; if by glaciers, till; if by wind, loess. 

One way or the other – do not rule out taxis – dirt travels from afar to present itself perkily in your yard, eager to grow food.  When you ignore it in favor of a sack-of-something from Walmart, it is like rubbing its nose in the –

Well.  The point here is not that there is anything wrong with bagged topsoil, which in fact tends to be beautiful dirt, but that probably there is nothing wrong with the dirt in your back yard, either – and there is more of it. 

As a consumer society, we perceive things that cost money as intrinsically more valuable than those that do not.  Quite often, the opposite is true.  Consider mother’s milk, which has now been proven exponentially more nourishing than the factory-produced baby formula that had almost entirely replaced it by the 1960s.  Compare friendship to salesmanship.  Compare true love to –

But back to dirt:  If yours is not perfect, work it.  Mulch it.  Amend it with compost.  Dig it and double-dig it.  Gardening is something one does, not something one buys.

In the gardening section one Saturday, our local newspaper featured Mexican immigrants who grew beautiful vegetable gardens.  Rather than relying on fertilizers or mechanization, the article marveled, these paisanos simply worked the soil with their hand tools until it “felt right.”

The next Saturday, the newspaper interviewed the owner of a local garden center about growing tomatoes.  His advice about dirt?  “Buy it from me.”

How ironic, that dirt in America should be best understood by those whose right to walk it is so bitterly contested.

Fellow gardeners, take a lesson from the immigrants.  The United States may be a lot of things – a beautiful idea, a noble experiment – but intrinsically, at its very foundations, it is also:

Dirt. 

Robin Ford Wallace lives in Deerhead Cove, where she plays quietly in the dirt, disturbing no one.