The Evolution of Dirt

I have always been a dirty girl. Messy, too, but that’s a different blog. No, dirt is my thing. I like the way it smells. I like the way it looks. I’m not totally a fan of having it tracked through my house, but nothing beats digging in it. Someone once said that no true gardener refers to dirt as dirt, the “correct” term being soil. I prefer dirt. Trying to make a friend understand this obsession, I summarized thus: dirt is all about potential. Everything starts with dirt.

I live on a small, residential lot, sadly stripped of all the topsoil it originally possessed. What remains is a gravelly mixture with a little dirt to serve as mortar. I’ve attempted to solve this problem by building garden boxes. It was a pricey undertaking. During our first summer I made numerous treks to Home Depot, 2 by 10s and 4 by 4s poking out of my car at odd angles. Saw. Hammer. Nail. The result was a quartet of rectangular “dirt-holders.” Long boxes, eight feet by four feet built up to a height of 20 inches now nestle at the north end of the yard where they receive the most sunshine during long summer days.

The boxes sat empty for the rest of their first season, funds for their construction having eliminated the possibility of buying dirt to fill them. Later, when a landscaper dumped 12 yards of topsoil on my driveway, I had to hire a teenager to cart it around the house and fill the boxes, one wheelbarrow load at a time.

Now begins the evolution of dirt. All dirt is not created equal. And good dirt must be created. Each year, I mix a bag or two of Gardener and Bloome Compost into the beds at the end of the season. Decomposing straw that lined the walkways also gets heaped onto the mix. Gradually, the dirt begins to feel richer. Less dry. More loam-y.

And this is what we dirty girls are after: Loam. Sandy soil dries out. Clay soil suffocates. Loam is the happy medium: perfect dirt. I’m not altogether convinced that true loam exists in a natural, unassisted form. It would be just too much luck to have perfect dirt to begin with. But that’s the goal. So every year I add a few more ingredients to the mixture—grass clippings and coffee grounds, compost and straw. And each year the dirt gets more “dirt-y,” just the way I like it.