#soil life

[divine-nonchalance]

We slid a finger into the forest soil and rubbed it on our lips. We kissed eachother and the planet.

Sejeluho

[mauricesmall]

Welcome to the deep work of urban vermicomposting.

[habitatbranch]

various images for permaculture inspiration

[faunmoss]

The Soils

This is the text of a little mini-zine that I’m working on. I plan to include some illustrations/ a poster as well as a little recommended reading list.

Soil, Earth and Humus hold a deep, intimate meaning for me that is hard to describe. Awe, hope, meaning, a sense of joy, a vastness and mystery similar to that of space or the abyssal ocean.

Soils sustain all plant & animal life on earth and are themselves teeming, darkly vibrant, full of life.

All that once lived will live again through the steady transformative actions of these intricate webs of grains of sand, particles of silt and clay, water, fungal networks, microbial communes, worms and other invertebrates. With time, in eons, even plastics will degrade. The soil is patient.

Resilient and resourceful alchemists, fungi and bacteria produce a stunning array of enzymes & acids with which to break down almost any molecules. They and the mosses and lichens and pioneer plants create soil from bare rock.

Fungal networks, intricate webs of one cell thin strands called hyphae, weave and burrow through the earth, connecting with plant roots, receiving photosynthesised sugars and offering water, vital minerals and protection against pathogens to trees, grasses and other plants. These mycorrhizae connect plants of different species, enabling them to exchange nutrients and information, nursing saplings or struggling plants.

In this mini-zine I can barely scratch the surface of the rich and multi-layered communities of soil organisms, the amoebas, algae and other single-celled life, tiny wormlike nematodes, springtails, waterbears, mites, pillbugs, millipedes, earthworms, snails & slugs, insects and their brood, spiders and centipedes, moles and shrews… breaking down shed leaves, old roots and wood, feeding on each other and on excrements; building humus and a nourishing habitat for seedlings and plant roots, the larger ones important prey for birds, for badgers, hedgehogs and wild boars.

In the soil, death and life are inextricably entwined, one becoming the other almost imperceptibly.

Never sterile, soils and the life within them know no dirt, no waste. Healthy soil communities can degrade and bind toxins, aerobically digest dead things so they won’t putrefy, and hold, store and cleanse water.

I want to call them clean and pure, yet those words are ill-fitting, do not quite encompass the richness of it. And still, all that passes through them will be groomed, will be rotted clean; a wordless quality of dark, decaying purity; a tenderness and grace.

It seems to me that boundaries are fleeting. Plants have endophytic fungi living within their tissues, animals including humans have vast arrays of beneficial microbes in our guts, on our skins without which we could not live. Fungal mycelium weaves through the earth, around and into rocks and roots, with symbiotic bacteria on each uncounted hyphal tip. Who is to say where one ends and the other begins?

Many consider humans to be at the ‘top of the food chain’. This has never made sense to me. Interwoven circles and webs stream to no endpoint and know no hierarchies, hold no one thing superior to others.

The beings of the soil support all other earth life in almost selfless ways, creating ever richer, ever deeper humus in which to digest, almost selflessly, the dead.

To them, we too must seem selfless.

[mauricesmall]

Some beginning growers and farmers asked me for good book recommendations for someone starting out their ecological and farming practices. Please look for the #smallbookz hashtag over the next 15 or so days. This will feature some of my favorites both current and over the years.

[mauricesmall]

“Community Composting Systems are built one pound, one kilo and one participatory person at a time.” Maurice Small

[mauricesmall]

Life is simple. Life is sweet. Life for worms is pretty sweet.

[mauricesmall]

Trending for over 3 years now. Aglanta2019❗️‼️‼️

Please make and effort to attend if you are in the Atlanta region. I will be speaking in the afternoon and it will be good to see you in the space.