Dirt! Lessons from the soil around us
By Nan Fawcett
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. 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.
Soil is the cradle of life
Just like we seldom see or even think about the ecosystem we inhabit, we are similarly cut off from the awareness of what's under our feet. 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. 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. From the beginning of our project, we have wanted to be an example of good ecosystem stewardship. 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.
Envisioning a variety of native plants
Just recently we have begun to envision different patches of taller natives, flowering forbs. We've brainstormed about how to get these new seeds to thrive without the use of herbicides. After much research and discussion, we’re poised to start planting once temperatures begin to break.
Outside my south door are thirteen flats of planted native forb seeds. Many of these will have beautiful flowers if they do well. Currently, they’re covered with straw to protect them 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.
Read the full post on Nan's blog, Green Tribe of Belonging
