By Shira Lynn
Taking care of plants and soil is an act of love—an expression of our commitment to growing a healthy and resilient community.
At the heart of ecological gardening and farming in the northeast is the endeavor to nurture living soils full of diverse life, in place and in perpetuity, while maintaining excellent water quality.
According to the 2023 MA Healthy Soils Action Plan, “Most people understand that soil supports the growth of plants and landscapes that define our daily lives—a grassy lawn, a field of sweet corn, a riverbank, a city shade tree, a protected forest. Of course, soils also support habitat, feed, and forage for the non-human world. Healthy soil makes biodiversity happen. In turn, biodiversity, including all its component parts, from microbes and fungal threads to pollinator plants and mast producing trees, to top predators, is nature’s engine that keeps soils healthy and drives carbon, water, nutrient, and energy cycling.”
What you might not realize is that living soils are also central to sequestering and storing carbon while aiding local climate cooling. Healthy soils absorb and filter water so as to prevent flooding, erosion and the spreading of contaminants while retaining moisture for dry periods.
So if you love birds, butterflies, dogs, daisies, tomatoes and kids, here are a few simple practices for stewarding living soil that you can adopt right now at home, in your neighborhood, where you work and play:
• Enjoy a diversely flowering lawn. Minimize soil compaction by mowing half as often. Start mowing for the season around the end of May and stop by the first of October. After all, why are you mowing when the grass is barely growing? Use smaller equipment that mulches as it goes. Remember that when something grows, it draws nutrients from the soil that want to be returned. Try not to interrupt the natural cycles that are designed for this purpose.
• Replace portions of lawns with shrubs and trees that root at varying depths and grow into interconnected communities with low branching that fosters a self-regulating understory. This improves water, carbon and cooling dynamics in addition to accumulating deeper soil. Hand rake autumn leaves into the understory for nutrient cycling. It’s the original mulch.
• Delineate undisturbed zones. Encourage biodiversity (and decrease management) by rewilding edges and interstitial spaces.
• Do not use pesticides and fertilizers. If a substance requires a yellow sign, it’s poison. Don’t poison your pets. Don’t poison the neighborhood kids. Don’t poison the soil and water. RIP the pesticide era!
Organic soil everywhere makes the whole world a healthier place for life.