We started our Master Gardener Training the other day with a full day lecture on soil. The instructors joked that we shouldn't worry about finding the subject of 'dirt' interesting (generally assuming it hadn't been before for most of us). Having been through a permaculture design course with Jonathan Bates who loves dirt, we had a place to hang new terms, data and history from the lecture.
Dawn Pettinelli of the University of Connecticut was our speaker, and she had an incredible passion for the life within the soil we walk on. She held up a coffee cup and said, "in one coffee cup of good garden soil, there are more micro-organisms than there are people on earth". She spoke about how much our lives are dependent on the life in the soil below our feet that we don't often acknowledge or sometimes even know about. When we were in school, we learned that soil is "a mixture of sand, silt and clay", not the wonder of the life cycle web of the living, dead and really dead. We got to touch various types of soil, variations of clay, silt, sand, and what we have here, a sandy loam excellent for cultivation. Reminded of our project of regenerating where we live, we got home and added to and turned the compost pile we've built over the last several months, feeling somewhat proud of what we have created.
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