Breaking Ground
I was preparing the soil, but it was also preparing me.
After all the restless fussing of early March, we finally have urgent things to do in the garden. Kenneth Grahame, author of The Wind in the Willows, wrote that the coming of spring fills the atmosphere with a “spirit of divine discontent and longing.” And there is indeed real pleasure in these still-cold mornings that bite your hands when you walk outside and turn your breath to smoke as you watch the birds jostle and dart in the budding trees. The old fathers were right to place Lent during this time of the year in the Northern Hemisphere—it’s a season of mud, mortality, and restless hope.
Yet despite this feeling of pervading momentum, it’s a deadly mistake to start planting things too early. Snow peas, radishes, and kale can be sowed directly even into chilly soil if you’ve chosen a sunny spot. Generally speaking, though, you don’t want to rush things or you’ll get poor germination—if anything sprouts at all. The only reliable way to know if the earth is ready for planting is to test it with your hands. If it’s warm to the touch even in the morning, you are ready to begin. That moment will happen at a slightly different time every year and it’s up to you, the steward of your small swath of earth, to know when the time has come for the cycle of planting and harvest to start over—the great revolution that nourishes and sustains us.
If you followed my advice in last November’s post about shutting the garden down, you will have dumped organic compost onto the bare soil of your cleaned garden beds, then used a hoe to till things up, leaving it heaped into uneven clods for the weather to break down. The nutrients of the winter’s rain and show, not to mention the dry air, have thoroughly treated the soil by now. If it feels warm to the touch, it is time to smooth everything out and ready it for planting. If last year’s crops were unimpressive, an intermediate step may be called for where you toss in some bonemeal or composted manure to boost its productivity. But if you are composting at home as much as you should, you’ll be able to give whatever you plant a good mulching after it’s in the ground, allowing the spring rain to wash all that goodness down to the roots.
Your main concern before planting, then, will be establishing that magical thing that experienced gardeners call “a good tilth.” Tilth is the condition of a tilled soil, a kind of openness and smoothness that makes planting easy and gives root systems the ideal conditions to rapidly expand. Whole books have been written about improving soil structure and I will save any longform advice about that process for a later day.
Suffice it to say that, whether your starting soil is clay, loam, or somewhere in between, a year or two of steady composting will gradually transform it into a dark brown substance that is easy to work yet nutritionally dense. It took about three years for this process to make appreciable progress at the Classical Roots Veggie Garden, so don’t be discouraged if it takes time for you as well. You cannot possibly be starting with worse soil than the brick-dense chemical wasteland with which we began, and our soil is now a nearly perfect brown-black loam.
In any case, you want to end up with a smooth surface that’s loose enough for you to do most of your planting by hand. By this I mean that you should be able to hold a seedling in one hand and make the opening for it with the bare fingers of another, with no need for a trowel or spade. To achieve such conditions, you’ll need to do a lot of raking. I tend to begin with a long-toothed rake of the kind you’d typically use in your yard for autumn leaves. As you rake, bin or compost all the roots, leaves, and scraps you find with the first three or four passes.
After that, switch to a short-toothed metal rake and work alternately longways and crosswise, evening the surface and again and again until the whole thing is a uniform height with no large clumps or debris. This process oxygenates the soil and works in the nutrients that lay on the surface during winter. Whatever you do, don’t turn the bed over with a shovel and disturb the hard-won balance of topsoil and subsoil. Most of all, don’t let anyone or anything step on it at any point in the process. Compacted earth is your enemy here.
I can remember precisely the moment I fell in love with gardening. My wife and I were renting an apartment whose entrance path abutted two small in-ground beds. Our landlords were kind enough to give us the use of them and, not really knowing what I was doing, I went to a garden store, bought a few herbs and tomatoes, and set to work. It was late May on our old New England street: the tulip trees were dropping their acid-green catkins on the road, the oaks were shooting into reddish leaf and, at the very end of the road, the Atlantic wrestled and glinted in the sunlight. I spent about an hour raking all the leaves and roots out, then stood up with the sun on my face and took everything in. I hadn’t planted a single thing, but the welcome soreness in my shoulders, the dirt caking my palms, and the feeling of connection that rushed through me was enough to get me hooked. I was preparing the soil. But it was also preparing me.
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