I GREW UP AROUND a bunch of farmers and gardeners who would often seek out the advice of the county extension agent. They would then listen, consider, and merge those technical instructions with the ways they’d always done things. They bought bags of smelly fertilizers and applied them at consistent rates according to chemical-based soil test results. They went to little meetings at the experiment station to learn about new peas. But then they’d spend half a day going into the woods, digging up worms and good, black, rotting leaf duff, hauling cow manure in buckets, or raking up some moldy hay from a truck spill off the side of the road to put around their cabbages and camellias. These were practical people—they mixed the old and the new to make their gardens better.
Sometimes, when they weren’t trying to teach me about the joys of growing okra, they would take me climbing in oaks pruned low by sand and salt-filled ocean breezes, or exploring in swampy ponds filled with waterlilies, ferns, and pitcher plants. Besides making a gardener out of me, they left me with an enduring respect and love for my elders. Today, sitting with an old man on a tailgate and hearing tales of how he started growing vegetables and plowing with a mule, then flew planes over Germany, fell in love, worked twenty years printing the first phone books the world had ever seen, and now volunteers with the local extension service, I’m entranced. Most of the people I interview in this book could not have imagined that they would be where they are today, given their rural roots. These sparkling, can-do, thrifty, wrinkled-with-laughter children of several depressions and wars started out in a country that was stuck deep between a rock and hard place. That predicament had a lot to do with food, gardening, and soil fertility.
Practical, rural people make life even easier by establishing gardens near their fertilizer source. Here, old blush rose climbs a crepe myrtle with love-in-a-mist below and Brangus cows in the pasture beyond.
Where I’m from, the South, an entire generation and their children—actually anyone alive from 1840 until 1942—were touched by soil depletion. Decades of greedy farming practices, especially growing repeated crops of cotton, ruined the soil. Rich people, like cotton planters, lost everything. Some of them drank themselves to death, while some of them kept pushing on, growing just enough food for their families and farm workers. All the while, the poor hunkered down in shacks with rows of collards. Huge population migrations took people to other states. The cotton farmers on one side of my family lived in a crumbling plantation, selling off bits of land to stay afloat. The sharecropper side had to move in with relatives. Think about how that poverty of the 1920s affected your family. All across the country, soil fertility problems led to illness, a generation of smaller people, and hunger.
Synthetic fertilizer then came along and changed everything. For most of us now, it’s hard to imagine a time when we couldn’t go to the store and stock up on bags of those magic pellets. But back then they didn’t exist. Instead, nitrates and guano came bagged from mines in Chile. Phosphates were mined and bagged in South Carolina. Yes, you spread them with spreaders, much like today’s fertilizers. But complete synthetic, pelleted fertilizer came on kind of suddenly; the transition is literally referred to as the Green Revolution and credited with producing more food, fiber, and fodder on once ruined lands. But all the promise of these developments came with some serious drawbacks. And for many, these were only discovered in time, with advances in microbiology and hindsight. You’d think we’d have learned. But today, fertility issues affect us in exactly the same ways, though the effects can be masked and abstract for the casual observer—but we all feel them.
Modern construction methods often leave sites stripped of all topsoil. This is the original construction site of Riverbanks Botanical Garden in South Carolina, where we would soon apply many old-fashioned soil-building techniques.
If you garden or grow any plants at all, you’re closer to fertility issues—you know that we have to supplement the soil if we want to have healthy plants. And I believe it’s time for a change in the ways we get nutrients to plants. Some of these are new ways, only recently understood by science. Some are old-school techniques used but later put away by our grandparents. We can fuse the old and the new to move forward. As gardeners, landscapers, and horticulturists with a deep connection to the dirt, we must lead that change. We must help others understand the impact that our actions are having on our soil. We can do better; we can fertilize our plants, camellias to cabbages, using natural cycles that get nutrients to plants and can lead us and our children to a soul-satisfying, healthier world of vegetables, flowers, and trees.
The Teachers
FRANK ATKINSON AND YVROSE VALDEZ
My two teachers here couldn’t be more different, but they’ve both had an immense influence on me at very different times in my life. Mr. Frank hired me for my first job, working on his old-style farm that today might be called a polyculture (using multiple crops in the same space) farm. I met Yvrose Valdez via social networks and friends of friends—thirty years later and many miles away from Mr. Frank’s farm, she was using many of the same principles in her suburban garden.
The same garden twenty years later, after planting began on red clay subsoil.
Frank Atkinson, or Mr. Frank, as we knew him, was one of my first teachers. I can still see his face, furious and totally perplexed, when I, as a teenager, drove his tractor straight through the side of his barn. And I still think back to his satisfied expression when I learned to separate the thumbtack-sized clover seedlings from the weeds—in a field he’d let me seed all by myself.
Mr. Frank was a farmer, and a John Deere man. His farm was at the end of a sandy lane with two tire tracks and Bermuda grass in the middle. Sometimes, to give the kids a thrill, my daddy would drive us in the bed of his 1969 Dodge truck fast down that lane, bouncing off all the little humps. We loved it—that was often what passed for excitement for children from rural flatlands. Along the sides of the road, where truck tires pushed the sand up into long rolls, we made toad houses around our feet in the summer and picked from the blankets of fuchsia, red or pink phlox, and crimson clover that came up in spring. The road passed the Atkinson compound of three houses, trailed off into tracks through cow pastures, orchards, and barns. I don’t know why, but the local Avon lady lived in one of the houses. Mr. Frank and his family were in the new house, and his “mudtha’,” as he’d call her, lived in the old house with the big front porch. Her garden was full of daffodils in the grass, spirea, thrift, iris, roses, camellias, and a low-limbed magnolia that was epic for climbing. Beyond, rolling hills of Bermuda hay, beef cattle, a you-pick scuppernong vineyard, and pecan trees made his a diverse farm with steady stream of income throughout all four seasons. He was a wiry, quiet man who never looked comfortable in either the John Deere jumpsuit or his Sunday suit. And for all the food that came off that farm, for all the flowers, for all that production, there was not, on the entire farm, a fertilizer storage room.
A sandy lane leading to days of adventure and education on a farm like Mr. Frank’s.
As a teenager, I was the farm boy. It felt then, and now, like an honor, a special position of trust and responsibility. Even today, when I see my predecessors, we talk about what a special job that was. Mr. Frank picked his boys carefully, and then he trained us and kept us around. He was a son of the depression; a gentle, reserved man whose idea of an off-color joke was anything including the word tallywhacker. All of us farm boys were sure he knew just about everything there was to know about engines, cows, plants, and barns. But he didn’t know that sometimes we pulled the truck or tractor up to an electric fence and entertained ourselves by waiting for him to lean against it. Then he’d cuss—well, he’d say “dern”—and shake his tingling hands out while we tried to hide our amusement.
Despite our antics, Mr. Frank was a serious and reticent man. And I know that he and his generation tried to do the right things to repair the land and leave us with something better. When someone showed up with that synthetic fertilizer, promising green again, it must have seemed like magic—Jack and the beanstalk stuff. People like him across the country must have imagined a world with no more mules pulling carts of manure, no more dust storms coating their houses, and, most importantly, no more undernourished, yellowing plants in failing fields or gardens—a green revolution, indeed.
Crimson clover and oats build organic matter and nutrients in the soil at the University of Tennessee Botanical Gardens.
In this new field for producing crinum lilies and purple pineapple lilies, we use quick-growing oats for their massive root system, which tills the soil and deeply incorporates organic matter.
Mr. Frank certainly did use synthetic fertilizer. I remember the instant jump in growth, too, after the nitrogen truck sprayed the Bermuda hay fields. But he also used the lessons of soil conservation. And the reason there wasn’t a fertilizer room on his farm probably had more to do with his thriftiness than any concern about safety. Why buy fertilizer, when you can just open a gate and let the cows clean up a field and manure it at the same time? Why buy fertilizer, when you can intercrop red clover under the pecan trees to enrich the soil? Why buy fertilizer, when beans inoculated with fungi spore produce more? He taught me to do all these things; he knew they were a part of the fertility cycle that conserved and created great dirt.
Yvrose Valdez, a wise, soulful gardener in Miami, has a stunning garden that reminds me of all that I’ve learned over the years from people like Mr. Frank. The road I took to meet her was a glaring and white-hot, five-lane city highway through Little Haiti, the poorest part of Miami. I had intentionally walked it for a few fascinating miles to get a feel for the neighborhood—but let’s skip to the moment that the hot sidewalk was subsumed by a garden, a food forest. Everything suddenly became cooler, greener, and chirpier. Though I’d never been here, I knew I’d found what I was looking for. Even the air felt alive and humming with energy. In my head, I greeted and thanked the unmistakable life force of healthy plants. There was no need to ask, and no need to check the house number; this was my destination.
Yvrose, a friend of a friend of a friend, hugged me and showed me her garden. It’s situated on a small city lot, and it’s so intense and sophisticated that we took all afternoon for the tour. She talked at length about food issues, health, and how US farm policy affects nutrition and education in Haiti, her home country.
She’s a beautiful woman, with silver-streaked hair and a strong, youthful body; a caring, worldly, and hip manifestation of the word grandmother. And this grandmother never does what most people would consider fertilizing; she doesn’t even add much compost. She lets legumes do the work. In shrub beds, pigeon pea is interplanted with mangos and mulberry bushes. Among flowerbeds, perennial peanut spreads its yellow flowers prettily, making a tight little groundcover, all the while pulling nitrogen and feeding the other perennials.
In the midst of otherwise typical landscapes, Yvrose’s garden is an Eden, spilling around the neighborhood sidewalks. She uses permaculture principles to manage these beds, interplanting legumes to help add nutrients for bromeliads and fruit trees.
These were farming techniques. Yet, here is Yvrose, a retired postal worker with a little backyard of flowers, using these old-school methods to feed her plants. I asked her why. “Because it works,” she said. “Because people who can’t buy fertilizer can do this. Because this is how my grandmother, who taught me to garden a hundred years ago, in the most beautiful hilly farms of Haiti, would have done it.” She’s a teacher, as well. She volunteers her time helping others to start community gardens, and she knows and supports the local permaculture people.
Yvrose Valdez in her Miami Shores food forest garden.
Her garden is so beautiful, so attractive, and full of food that it never occurred to me that it could be considered controversial by anyone’s standards. But it was. Yvrose says:
When I first did this bed, I had a little problem initially with the village inspector. It seemed wild. I told him, look, take me in front of the judge and I’ll tell him I’m a retired person growing some food, and I keep it clean. No problem since. The other day he stopped to pick some lychee fruits! It was the first time he’d ever eaten a lychee!
That’s Yvrose teaching again; evoking the spirit of her forebears and inspiring me to remember the lessons of my mentors like Mr. Frank.
Updates and Adaptations
On our farm, or on any farm, we are always taking things away, thus depleting the soil. Plants, vegetables, and flowers are made of dirt, sun, and water. So every time we harvest, we’re selling a bit of our farm. We all do this. Every time we cut the grass, rake, eat a peach, or put on a cotton shirt, we’ve taken stuff out of the dirt. Plants are like little mining machines, pulling nutrients from the dirt. All the things we have, from medicine to smart phones, have some mineral from the dirt in them.
And since we take, we have to put back. For the past few decades, we’ve done that via bagged fertilizer produced in factories. Fertilizer did help save our soil, and it did feed the world. But, in hindsight, we know there were unanticipated repercussions. Almost no synthetic fertilizer puts back equally what we take out. So some micronutrients slowly deplete from the soil. We have to add more. The more we add, the more we damage microorganisms. We end up destroying those things like the fungal relationships that allow Yvrose’s beans to pull nitrogen from the air. We stop the natural systems that change rocks, minerals, and even plant parts into soil nutrients.
Think about what lies under the dirt way, way down: rock. As that rock weathers, it becomes soil. But that change is more than just weathering. Naturally occurring fungi, bacteria, algae, and microscopic worms break down rock further, into nutrients the plants can use. Today, soil scientists understand their functions and fragility so much more clearly than they did just a few decades ago. In fact, soil microbiology is a whole new science. We know that factory-produced, salty fertilizer and pesticides kill these microorganisms and stop the conversion process. The cycles are all tied together, which explains why it is popularity referred to today as the soil food web.
Sensitive briar and four-wing bean can pull nitrogen from the air into the soil.
We look for ways to get those natural cycles rolling again. We want to help and encourage the web of life in the soil to provide fertility to our plants. One easy way to do this is to do exactly what Mr. Frank and Yvrose taught me to do: interplant plants that have the beautiful ability to provide nutrients to other plants. These plants, mostly from, but not limited to, the bean family, can pull nitrogen from the air, store it in their roots, and release it into the soil. In between our lily rows, purple peas, yellow flowering peanuts, and lima beans do just that. We overseed with clover and add flowering indigo to shrub borders. In new gardens that I make for clients, I seed in clover or peas. Though some people think of clover as a weed, it’s an attractive plant and a great conversation starter. And since my day with Yvrose, I’ve included legumes in every garden and landscape I’ve made. From little white clover to huge Kentucky coffee bean trees, I seek plants that feed other plants.
But there is one caveat. For the most effective nitrogen fixation, you need to treat the roots of any new plant or seed with a fungal inoculant when you plant. This kind of helpful fungus—called mycorrhizae—really does all the work, and the spores of these tiny organisms may not be in your soil. The truth here is that this fungi, rather than the plant root itself, pulls nitrogen from the soil. Mycorrhizal fungi help us provide nutrients to plants. They come in many shapes and sizes—some even glow—but mostly they are long, hair-like structures running through almost all healthy soil. Normally, you can’t see them, but every once in awhile, you’ll see a mass of fiber, fabric-like stuff in the dirt. I can see this covering on lots of my vegetable and plant roots at home, and the webby hairs can be yards long. And yards of them can fit in just a single tablespoon of dirt. They intertwine, penetrate, and help your plants’ roots get nutrients.
The three—roots, bacteria, and fungi—then live together for the rest of their lives, each providing something the other needs. Each different plant species in the world may have connections with different bacteria. There may even be specialized bacteria that help other bacteria set up profitable relationships—bacteria-brokering bacteria. In a single teaspoon of soil, in fact, there may be up to 30,000 species of bacteria.
Think of a plant’s roots like your arms when you’re trying to reach a jar on the top shelf of the pantry that is just out of reach; your fingertips touch it, but you can’t quite pull it down. If you could somehow magically extend your arm even just an inch, you’d have it. Well, for your plant roots, that magic extension is often a fungus. They are like living pick-up grippers for nutrients; they can extend the range of roots by up to a thousand times. They’re important tools for you to be aware of and cultivate for your plants. For your flowers and shrubs, they’re beneficial, but for your vegetables, fruits, and grains, they’re essential.
Besides physically extending the reach of plant roots, fungi also help your plants reach nutrients in another way: they help with that natural cycle, that weathering of the soil. Many nutrients are chemically combined in ways that prevent plants from reaching them. Plants simply do not have the ability to break down certain chemical bonds. Mycorrhizal fungi, however, are connected, living on the outside and even on the inside of plant roots, so they are a direct delivery system of these nutrients. Those little hairs get nutrients from wood, bones, and little rocks. They can even trap and digest tiny worm-like animals—these are all things that plant roots cannot do. A hunk of rotting wood in the soil may be full of nutrients, but plant roots cannot wrap around it and suck out what they need. Some nutrients need to be changed into other forms in order for plants to make use of them. Mycorrhizal fungi exude compounds that can break down those chemical bonds and then deliver those nutrients to plants. Fungi convert phosphorus, one of the most important nutrients for plants, from a form plants can’t use, to a form they can. Fungi also have access to lots of micronutrients, including zinc, copper, iron, and calcium, which are in the soil but inaccessible to plants by themselves due to constraints of chemistry.
The white webbing—mycorrhizal fungi—on this crinum bulb is microbial life that helps the roots find nutrients.
There are microscopic worms that eat the bacteria and fungi. And there is bigger stuff that eats them. Throughout their lives, they are excreting—through sex, birth, sickness, and death—always adding more nutrients to the soil. All the sticky stuff of their lives holds the soil together. If we all do our part to encourage that underground life, all that sticky stuff can also be the building blocks of our gardens and lives.
Farmers have long used inoculants to stimulate growth of beans. I use a tested bacterial and fungal inoculant, shown here on spinach seeds.
If we do find a correlation between diversity of plants and diversity of microbes, then this would suggest that a good way of conserving microbial diversity is to select areas with high plant diversity. The underlying idea behind all this is that humanity should try to conserve microbial diversity because, although a small number of species cause diseases, most are very useful in one way or another—including drug discovery.
The forests of Madagascar are in imminent peril. Chris Birkinshaw (left) spends days in the wild, working with local farmers to identify the most diverse forest. Diversity in plant life may indicate diversity in microbial life in the soil.
Our crinum nursery is an old-style field nursery, where everything is grown in the ground, in rows. Tom and I do everything in our power to care for and encourage these natural cycles in the soil. And while we have seen a very slight slowing of our production, we take comfort in the idea that we are eating and living off a system that is better for both the earth and ourselves. And while we’re not quite there yet, our ultimate goal goes beyond just giving up synthetic fertilizer—our aim is to not bring any fertilizers at all onto the farm from outside. But to do that, we’d need more animals, equipment, or labor. We still use a seaweed-based fertilizer twice each summer, which keeps things growing at a good pace and strikes a balance between the desire to be purely site sufficient and the reality of running a nursery where we need to keep our plants growing at a production pace.
Vegetables, herbs, and flowers are only the visible part of our crinum farm. These plants help build up the health of unseen microorganisms in the soil.
Another update we’ve made to help stimulate the soil food web is a modification of an old-school gardening technique. Since we don’t have the animals or the labor to regularly cover the entire field in compost, we make compost tea, which works as an inoculant. It holds an incredible concentration of bacteria and fungi, which we use to keep our soil life super active. We use a 55-gallon brewer, which requires a 24-hour brewing period, during which air and liquid temperature are monitored. Compost teas are living liquids, and thus must be used fresh. You can make similar compost teas and inoculate your soil even if you live in an apartment, or garden on a terrace twelve stories up. Bokashi is a very cool process for making indoor tea developed in Japan—a place where every bit of space and landfill is valued.
This compost tea foam smells rich and sweet, indicating the presence of proteins and carbohydrates.
The only other thing we add to our garden is organically grown Bermuda hay to mulch the fields. That hay feeds fungi, bacteria, worms, and, ultimately, our plants. One of the first jobs Mr. Frank gave me was to bale Bermuda hay to feed his cows. He left me with that legacy. He also taught me to consider the needs of each specific plant and to inoculate seeds with tiny, dehydrated organisms that helped them grow better. The lesson for me was this: there are things we can’t see that are crucially important to things we can see. Now we unfurl that same hay onto our new-style, no-till farm as a way to feed our soil, our plants, our bodies, and to supply gardeners across the country with cool bulbs.
Rolling big, round bales of Bermuda hay around the crinum farm. Bermuda hay is also available in easier-to-manage square bales.
Our farm is our small experiment where we can share sustainable gardening practices with others. On a larger scale, leaders in landscaping, gardening, and sometimes even corporate farming demonstrate that we can change our fertility systems. We can grow lots of healthy, productive plants that provide food, medicine, construction materials, and pleasure by understanding and manipulating natural systems. This doesn’t mean going back to mules and wagons, or to shiploads of bird poop sailing around the world. Rather, it’s building on how the farmers and gardeners of just a few decades ago worked; by picking up the good bits and moving forward. With real inquiry, and whole science, we can provide nutrients to our plants through old methods and new techniques. The world of plants above and below the soil remains larger than science has yet to fully comprehend. As gardeners, we must embrace that mystery, that spark of life; we must honor it in everything we do outside.
A glass of tea from my bokashi compost bucket can be mixed with 5 gallons of water and used as a fertilizer. Next to it is the bran that you would sprinkle into the bucket every few weeks.
Developed in Japan in the 1980s, the bokashi composting method basically pickles your kitchen waste. You put everything in an airtight bucket—be sure to use a bucket with a drainage spout near the bottom—and add a mix of microbes and bran meal, which is available on the web or in specialty stores. Add scraps for a few weeks and then sprinkle on the meal. Then, from the spout, you can pour a nutrient-rich cup of compost tea. Mix that with water and use it to fertilize your plants. Every few weeks, you dump the compacted compost materials from the bucket and start again. I bury mine in the yard. A friend who lives in a 12th-floor condo tried this, too. At first he liked it; his patio citrus were definitely improving. He’d take his monthly bundle of compost downstairs in the elevator and bury it in a bed near the community pool. But he later admitted that the process was cumbersome and he wasn’t fond of the smell when emptying the bucket. But you could simply throw the compost away, or if you live in a dense city, there may be a bokashi service that will come and pick up your compost and leave you with a clean bucket. Indeed, the process can be slightly unpleasant, thanks to the appearance and smell of what comes out of the bucket, but it’s great stuff, and worms will flock to it. After a few weeks, it will turn into beautiful black dirt.
In my household in the city, we always have lots of fresh produce waste and a small yard. The bokashi method is perfect for us. And if you’re concerned about the smell, don’t be; neither the bucket or the tea smell very much at all when they’re sitting on the kitchen counter (though you might want to avoid sticking your nose into the bucket). I never have any issues with flies or other insects. After using the tea for a few weeks on your potted plants, you’ll see a marked difference in foliage color.
