You’re moving the dirt?

This is the question we have been asked by complete strangers and close family members over the last week.  Yes, we’re moving the dirt.  All of it.  Mostly by hand. 

We’ve spent the last 5 years building soil – the kind of rich, loose, humus rich soil that gardeners dream of.  It is so much more than “dirt”.  It is rich in microbes, bacteria, and countless other critters that convert the organic matter into food for our plants.  It is the magic ingredient that makes our organic garden work.  The soil life grows healthy plants that can shrug off most diseases and the various micro fauna that live there attract the birds that take care of our insect pests.  It is what lets us not till, not spray and not worry about it.  The permaculture ecosystem that we want to build on the farm will be built on this kind of soil and it cannot exist without it.  Given that we are planting grass here that does not require anything like this (which is why it survives when people poison the soil multiple times a year in the name of fertilizer, weed killers and grub killers), the question for us is “Why wouldn’t you move the soil?” 

So now that we’ve looked at the why, let’s see how much soil we’re really talking about here.  Over the course of the last week, we’ve moved somewhere around 37 cubic yards or 20 truck bed loads of soil up to the farm.  For a visual, that looks like a pile that is about 5 feet tall, 8 feet wide and about 20 feet long plus a raised bed that is about 5 feet wide and about 40 feet long.  Now, we didn’t do it by the truck load exactly.  We have been fortunate enough to borrow a bobcat from a friend of a friend and we rented a heavy equipment trailer for the week.  Using the bobcat to load the big trailer, plus our Ford F150 plus a smaller trailer meant that we moved all that soil in only 8 trips.  While I feel very fortunate to have had the bobcat to load the vehicles, we have unloaded everything by hand.  That is several thousand shovel fulls of dirt and our arms felt every one of them.

We’ve also been moving plants as we go.  This is another one of those things that people ask about – “you’re moving ALL the plants?  Why?”  Again, it comes down to the accumulated biodiversity we’ve built where we are.  We have plants that fill so many niches in an ecosystem and that serve so many different purposes that to leave them behind would set us back 3-5 years in establishing our garden on the farm.  By comparison, the time spent digging, potting, moving and replanting seems pretty trivial.  Besides, its fun to figure out where the plants will go and to start building a new garden.  There is now a little corner of the farm (the southwest corner to be precise) that looks a bit like home.  It has currants, daisies, daylilies, irises, plums, horseradish, gooseberries, and rhubarb.  I’m probably forgetting a few others too.  Several of our dwarf fruit trees are planted along the edge of the bed as well – both apples, both pears and both peaches.  The cherries are next.  From this small beginning, we hope to turn the entire lower field (about 3 acres) into a permaculture food forest that produces all the food our family wants to eat with a surplus to share.  One day it will be that.  For now, it’s just a little corner raised bed with some plants in it.

We still have a lot to move.  There will be at least 3 more truckloads of dirt to relocate – this time by hand on both ends.  There are 2 large compost piles to move which will make at least 2 more truck loads, maybe more.  We have several dozen plants yet to dig and replant along with the 100 strawberry plants, 400 onion plants, and several dozen grapes and blackberries that are potted up and waiting in the greenhouse.  While that sounds like a lot, it’s less than we normally put out in our garden, so it feels very doable.  Once all that is done, we will level the yard here and put in some form of grass (seed or sod – yet to be decided). 

While it is very sad to me to have our house revert to a standard American yard again, the fact that we have a 2-5 year head start over where we started here makes it much easier to accept.  We are, after all, taking the most important part with us – the dirt!