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“What is soil?”
I look around the circle to see everyone scratching their heads. The only thing that comes into mine is ‘dry mud’, which I am not prepared to say out loud.
Zoe, our teacher, graciously lets us know the answer she was looking for, “Soil is made up of water, air, minerals and organic matter - both living and dead.”
It seems obvious now she says it and I’m sure I’ve learnt this before, but like so much of the simplest information about the natural world that I learnt as a child, it had long been forgotten.
This question marks the start of a 12 week horticulture course I have recently attended, and initiates a change in how I see the soil, beginning to have more of a sense of it’s innate aliveness. Focusing on this quality of the soil is helping me understand how our agricultural ecosystems need careful management and stewardship. If the soil is a rich bed of life from which many of our plants, fungi, bacteria and animals emerge, then farming practices that homogenise the soil are in danger of hugely reducing the wonderful complexity of our living systems.
The technique we’re using to grow plants is one that tries to support this natural complexity, that emerges over time in undisturbed soil. It’s called ‘no-till farming’ and the particular version we’re using involves killing off this year’s weeds with a mulching layer on top of your soil beds, then adding a layer of fresh compost over the top on which we grow. No pesticides are used and we aim for as little disruption to our existing soil structure as possible. It seems questionable the exact method we’re using could scale up globally, but apparently practices adjacent to this one have that potential.
Going local
The UK currently imports around 45% of it’s food supply. That amounts to £47 billion in food imports. At the same time we export £23 billion of food (lots of this is premium goods like whisky, beer, cheese and beef). This exchange of goods is common for a wealthy nation in our modern globalised economy, but is it really the best way of doing things?
Both Covid and Brexit have helped give us a whiff of how these global supply chains are vulnerable to disruption. With the realities of climate change playing out this year and in coming years, the vulnerabilities of our food systems, and their reliance on vast quantities of fossil fuels and fertilisers, are likely to come into sharper focus. So how can we ensure our future food security? Can the country in times of need feed itself? Or scaling down, can the place I live feed itself?
Totnes Transition Towns are a group who’ve been looking into future-proofing the area we live in by making it less reliant on fossil fuels and external inputs. Reading the food section of their Totnes Energy Descent Action Plan is both fascinating in the level of detail they’ve looked into this question but also a tad unsettling that even in such a rural area as Totnes there are real challenges presented to feeding ourselves. They reference World War II style allotment and backyard gardening being necessary to get high enough yields with minimal use of fossil fuels. They also talk about needing to greatly improve how we manage the fertility of the soil including recycling human urine and poop more purposefully to make use of the microbes, nitrogen and other minerals that are contained in our food and largely remain intact in our waste.
The regenerative angle on agriculture involves trying to transition our food systems from ones that require huge inputs of raw materials, chemical compounds and fossil fuels that get depleted or lost, to more circular systems that reuse materials and ideally improve soil quality to improve the prospects of our ability to feed ourselves in future generations, and cover the soil so that it can act more effectively as a carbon sink.
The step in the local and regenerative direction that our household has taken since moving to Totnes is that we get a veg-box from Riverford every couple of weeks. Riverford is a big organic farm a couple of miles down the road. They are employee-owned, and are respected for their ethical considerations reflected in the weekly note that comes with your veg-box where Guy Singh-Watson, the chief executive, reflects on practices in the farming industry and Riverford’s attempts to improve them. That said, when you’re in the pub and you talk to people about Riverford, you still hear stories about the crappier practices that seem to accompany any organisation that has scaled beyond it’s humble roots.
An alternative To Riverford would be to support a local community-supported agriculture project. In our area, there are at least three: School Farm CSA, The Apricot Centre and Pondfields. You pay them a weekly fee and get a share of what they’re able to grow with the money they have collected and with the help of local volunteers. Apparently some weeks you get a modest harvest and other weeks you get a real bounty.
Kathryn and I have enjoyed the challenge of living mainly off British vegetables each week since moving down to Devon. But by the end of Winter we get pretty fed up of cabbage, Jerusalem artichokes and turnips and usually find ourselves supplementing the veg box from the supermarket more often.
Horticulture Level 1
In my search for more of a sense of self-reliance I found myself on the previously mentioned Level 1 Horticulture Course at Foxhole Community Gardens to learn the basics of vegetable growing.
It was instantly a rewarding experience. Being given permission to acknowledge how little I knew, to ask lots of questions along the way, to spend whole days outside - some times with the sun beating down on us, other days with the rain coming at us horizontally while we sheltered under the round-house.
We went through a whole cycle of growing vegetables from their seeds to eventually harvesting them and eating them. We learnt about soil, compost and plant health and about all the other creatures we were competing with to get our food out the ground before they get to it first.
Nutrient deficiencies
We learnt about the common mineral deficiencies that plants encounter. Nitrogen, potassium and phosphate being the most important. They are the main ingredients in plant fertiliser, concocted in various proportions. But plants also need a good supply of magnesium, zinc, calcium and other minerals. I started this course after spending the last few years working on a ward for people experiencing eating disorders, frequently monitoring people’s blood and supplementing their diets with these exact same minerals.
When someone starts eating again after a period of starvation there’s a real risk of them encountering something called re-feeding syndrome, where their fluid and electrolyte balances dramatically shift. The most concerning consequence of this is that someone’s body will run out of phosphate, which is used in every cell as part of the reaction that releases energy, breaking down glucose and oxygen into carbon dioxide and water (the ATP to ADP reaction for you GCSE biology nerds).
For our patients who were often sick after they ate, we were looking out for low potassium or magnesium levels. These can have all sorts of effects on the body but the most immediately concerning is that it can interfere with the electrical activity within cells which can stop someone’s heart from beating.
The crossover between working to keep a plant healthy and to keep a human healthy wasn’t obvious to me and it has been a humbling reminder of how interwoven our worlds are.
Weeds
We learnt how to spot and stem the spread of various weeds. When I asked why we were pulling out a particularly beautiful one, Zoe reminded me that a weed is just a plant that’s growing somewhere you don’t want it. In this case because it was likely to outcompete our vegetables for space, sunlight and nutrients.
We use the word weed when something is seen as a nuisance, something that’s hard to control and that we have to fight against. But perhaps setting ourselves opposed to these various plants means we have been missing out on some of the rich parts they can play in our lives.
The protein content of many common weeds such as mallow, ground elder, nettle and dandelion is notably higher than in the vegetables we tend to grow and consume, and they can also be good sources of important vitamins.
We refer to cannabis as ‘weed’ with a similarly demonising intent. Historically the prohibition of cannabis destroyed the hemp industry, but it’s fortunately now in revival as it’s extremely useful as a natural fibre and grows very quickly. As we loosen up on the negative connotations surrounding cannabis, its medicinal qualities are also becoming more well established in mainstream society with tons of research looking into using it and it’s derivatives to treat various physical and mental health conditions (though as a mental health nurse I have to say, it can still fuck you up).
After learning more about weeds on this course, I was walking in to the sea and saw a piece of seaweed floating towards me. I noticed that now holding a friendlier definition of the word weed, the icky feeling that made me previously dodge seaweed disappeared instantly. I was hit with a cascading realisation that an aversion to weeds had in some sense corresponded with an aversion to seeing how abundant and omnipresent life is. Something as simple as stepping into the sea was suddenly enough to be met by copious, amorphous, rubbery sheets of life washing towards me. In the rocks around the sea I saw plants and moss growing out of every tiny crack where they were able to take hold. Every mouthful of sea water, or lungful of air containing an abundance of microscopic life. In that moment the planet suddenly seemed much less inert and much more alive than it does to me normally.
Weeds can symbolise our constant opposition to nature and the forces of nature over time. But they can also symbolise the vigour and ferocity of life to always find a way through. It just depends where I’m choosing to look at it from.
Garden Warfare
Growing vegetables appears to be a constant battle against more than just weeds. Aphids, butterflies, slugs, rabbits, rats and many more creatures are just as keen to gobble up my vegetables as I am. Zoe, our extremely gentle and kind teacher, joked that she understands how war can exist in this world because of the venom she’s felt inside her when she returns to the gardens and finds that a rabbit has decimated her vegetables. She’s had to have rabbits as pets for her daughters to try and reduce some of this rage within her.
So we spend time learning about how to build rabbit-proof fences, when to mesh our cabbages to stop butterflies from laying their eggs on the leaves and how we can attract certain birds and bugs to eat or scare away others.
The competitive element of living in our society is something I’ve always struggled with. If the company I work for does well one year maybe I’m rewarded but perhaps someone working for our competitor has to lose their job. Yes it’s great England won such-an-such a football game, but did you see how equally sad the team were that lost?
I’ve always shied away from conflict because I struggle to hold on to the importance of my needs and desires in the face of someone else’s. I want to believe that focusing on cooperation is enough to see us through this life, and that’s probably why I’ve tended to work for organisations where something other than making money, which feels to me fundamentally competitive, is the primary goal. But mental health nursing has made the importance of advocating for my own needs even clearer. The less-experienced version of nursing involves running around all day trying to satisfy my patients’ (and sometimes colleagues’) endless unmet needs, and it destroys you. Whereas the artful version of nursing involves having the boundaries to not surrender to other people’s needs, but help them meet their own.
The horticulture course has also had a lot to teach me here. Because a season growing vegetables brings up so much of the drama contained within life and death, with competition and collaboration weaved into every moment of it. Without the collaboration of the sun, the rain, the plants, their roots, and the microorganisms and creatures in the soil we wouldn’t even have any food to eat in the first place. Good horticultural practices align themselves with these natural systems to enhance and curate the beautiful symphony that unfolds even before we get involved.
And at the same time the plants compete for space, sunlight and nutrients. Weeds tend to be the plants that have come up with the most ingenious ways of spreading their seeds far and wide to help them outcompete their rivals. As soon as my vegetables are in the ground and starting to shoot up I’m forced to get serious about fighting off foe. So I collect up over 50 hungry slugs I find under the cabbages and feed them to the equally hungry ducks on-site. My kale begins to come through but by the next week it’s been eaten right down to tiny stumps, most likely by rats or rabbits, and is certainly not going to grow back. They say the best fertiliser is a farmer’s shadow. The more attentive you are to your crops the better they are likely to fair against pests and disease. But there is always a limit to how much control you have and how much you should interfere.
I feel like this course has taught me a lot. Some things I’ve had the chance to think through, but plenty more metaphors that gardening and growing have begun to expose me to that are slowly working their way through my subconscious. I’ve felt a little closer to the food I’ve been eating and what it’s taken to find it’s way to my plate. I’ve felt the joy and delight of eating something that I sowed from a seed and how the story being richer is enough to make the flavour richer. I will no doubt keep buying the occasional avocado from Peru or mango from Sri Lanka, but I’m hoping I have better sense of the benefits of putting some effort into getting most of my food from much closer to home.
Invitations…
Consider signing up for a veg box from your local community-supported agriculture project? (We’re going to switch over).
Plant something this Autumn to tend over the Winter?
And please reach out if you fancy writing something for the newsletter, all ideas welcome?
The horticultural course finished a few weeks ago and I’ve been slow to write about it. That might be part of the reason why I don’t really like what I‘ve written this time round. Feels a bit clunky and unfinished. But as this newsletter is a test of a perfectionist streak I have that gets in the way of me living my life and expressing myself I’m going to post it now anyway. I haven’t added this on fishing for reassuring compliments but more to express a little extra gratitude for you reading my works in progress.