Readers and Growers,
A little more than a year ago, we took the first step—maybe the most important step—in making a small orchard out behind our barn: we had a local tree service haul in a few truckloads of dirt to a spot that gets all-day sun. I asked them to make a long berm that would be about a foot-and-a-half high and sixty feet long. I had discussed this with my nephew Seth, who studies and teaches soil science, and he was strongly in favor. The area in question has a pretty high water table and can be flood prone; he advised raising the trees up as high as possible so their roots wouldn’t be too wet.
Having consulted a book called The Holistic Orchard (by Michael Phillips, find it here), I wanted more than just dirt. I had been building up some piles of wood chips and I got the landscapers to mix the chips thoroughly into the soil of the berm. I learned from Phillips that nothing makes the roots of trees happier than to exist with good mycorrhizal fungi. Wood chips are the way to get it going. Phillips explained: “Human health is a function of plant health, which is a function of soil health, which in turn is a function of fungal health.” As Phillips put it, “The tops of deciduous trees and woodsy shrubs . . . pruned and subsequently run through a chipper into coarse pieces are what rock the biological kasbah.”
In April, I chose six fruit trees from a local nursery—two cherries, two apples, and two peaches. I dug the holes, set them in, and hoped for the best. The trees soon had spring blossoms. They began to leaf out. But more recently, one of the apple trees—Esopus Spitzenburg—began to look a little iffy, with leaves curling a bit.
And so it begins. What is going on with Spitzenburg? Too much water or not enough? Is the soil not quite right? I never found out where the dirt came from—I just trusted the tree company to bring the right stuff. And, in any event, who knows what is happening below the surface? What we can’t see with our own eyes, like the ecosystem of plant roots and fungi, can be so mysterious. The tree itself gives clues, but I don’t know how to read them.
This is where it would be good to have the family soil scientist at my beck and call—but it turns out he’s rather busy in his academic career at Washington University in St. Louis. And he’s been preoccupied by bigger issues than what’s happening in my little orchard. To wit:
The husband and wife team of Montserrat Bonvehi Rosich and Seth Denizen are now out with a book called Thinking Through Soil. Officially released on June 10 by Harvard University Press, it is now available at the HUP site and at Bookshop, the always-preferred alternative to the BezoStore.
Here they are in April, discussing their book at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design.
This discussion was livestreamed, and the video is still up at the School of Design’s website. I listened to it and it clarified for me why the authors have been making so many trips to Mexico over recent years. The book is about “the world’s largest wastewater agricultural system.” It examines the relationship between Mexico City and the agricultural valley that receives the city’s wastewater—enough to irrigate about 250,000 acres of farmland.
Their work comes from a point of view that Seth explained in the talk. The project, he said, is “to think about soil not as a separate subject.” It is an essential subject not just in agriculture but in landscape architecture and in city-building. He elaborated:
“Soil is a black box; people don’t know that much about it. The understanding of microbial life in the soil is at its absolute infancy. . . . I think it’s really important to understand that when we think about soil, we almost think like, ‘oh, yes. That old discipline of soil science.’ No, it’s actually completely new. And someone needs to think about how we’re going to incorporate all of this new soil knowledge into the way in which we work. . . . So we’re at a kind of dawn, we’re at the beginning of a long moment, or rethinking, or beginning to think for the first time, about how we might integrate soil into our way of perceiving our environment, designing our environment, critiquing our environments.”
There was a moment in the discussion that was a little puzzling. The moderator noted that Montserrat (who we know as Tat) was well known when she taught at the GSD for her view on “line weights.” I later asked Seth what that was about.
He explained that in architecture there is a tension between those who favor line drawings, which can be precise but technical, and those who use image-making software (like Photoshop) to convey a (perhaps market-driven) ideal of a beautiful architectural result. Tat and Seth are in the line-drawing camp.
We can leave the particulars of that dispute to the landscape architects. All I can say is that the drawings that illustrate the book are inventive, artful, and strangely evocative. You can see one at the top of this letter. Here’s another example:
While we’re on the topic of soil knowledge, I highly recommend a story Jill Lepore wrote for the March 24 New Yorker, under the title “The Book of Ruth.” It’s about the life of Ruth Stout, who has been rediscovered by many of today’s organic farmers and gardeners. She grew up in the early 1900s on a farm in Kansas with her brother Rex Stout, who became a famous writer of detective stories. Ruth published three books on what she called the “no work” method of gardening, one in 1955, one in 1961, and one in 1971. They are now back in print. As Lepore wrote: “She didn’t plow and she didn’t dig. She didn’t use fertilizers or pesticides. She never watered or weeded.” So much of the no-till methods, or permaculture ideas, that are regaining popularity today were expounded on by Ruth Stout a generation ago. But she was only rediscovering knowledge that was already old: Lepore says Ruth was likely “exposed to the ideas of the Polish-born Jan Owsinski . . . who introduced the notion of no-till farming in Russia in 1899 with The New System of Farming.” Both Rex and Ruth traveled in American radical circles; Ruth worked for a while at The New Masses, “a socialist magazine that Rex had helped found.”
In 1942, J.I. Rodale came along and started Organic Farming and Gardening magazine. Ruth was a regular contributor. And then, Lepore writes, “During the second back-to-the-land movement, in the sixties and early seventies, Ruth Stout’s books gained a cult following.” The Rodale Press became a big force in the world of health and nutrition. Now Ruth’s work is discussed all over social media and on gardening and homesteading podcasts.
Not digging up or plowing the existing layer of topsoil is the golden rule in this tradition. (My sister-in-law Kate has been writing about the “permaculture” approach in her “Roughhousing” newsletter and notes here the work of Huw Richards and Charles Dowding.) If you mention a desire to get out and work with a roto-tiller these days, you’re likely to hear a stern “don’t do that,” as I did quite a while ago when I first discussed with Seth my plan to plant a small orchard. I’m sure he’s right that the approach to soil science he envisions is new, but it’s also striking that a kind of basic knowledge about healthy soil is as old as dirt. And it has to get dug up and re-learned every generation.
There is one more part of that story about Ruth Stout that made my mind wander. Lepore reports that when Ruth was almost ninety, she sent a postcard to CBS saying that she was planning to assassinate President Richard Nixon. “I’m willing to spend the rest of my life in prison for doing it,” she wrote. Ruth soon got a visit at her house from two FBI agents. Apparently they decided “that a woman almost ninety years old had no immediate plans to kill the president.”
Nixon, of course, resigned from office in August of 1974—because there were enough principled Republicans in Congress back then that he was in danger of being impeached and convicted. Gerald Ford took office and said “Our long national nightmare is over. Our Constitution works; our great Republic is a government of laws and not of men. Here the people rule.”
Today, the president believes he is above the law. The Supreme Court has blessed the old Nixon doctrine that “when the president does it, that means that it is not illegal.” The Constitution works? If Congress can’t impeach and convict a recalcitrant lawbreaker like Trump, the impeachment powers are as dead as dry parchment. You know what our real “long national nightmare” is? The presidency itself.
Fascinating! Just sent this to my landscaper, otherwise known as the Landscaping Witch here in Austin.
Ha! I had just bookmarked this interview with Stout, planning to post it later in the week: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FB5_NmqTOm8