Green Options

Soil is one of a gardener’s most important resources, and preserving its health and vitality one of our most crucial responsibilities. Nourish the soil sustainably and you’ll be rewarded with healthier plants and bountiful harvests for years to come.

I was reading National Geographic the other day, and came across an article on soil called “Our Good Earth.” The article discusses the problems facing soils all over the planet, and made me realize just how precious healthy soil really is. We’re losing topsoil rapidly as we consume more and more land to house and feed the ballooning human population. It can take nature over a thousand years to produce just one inch of soil, but erosion, compaction, and contamination can wipe it away much faster. This precious resource, the means to sustain and feed us and the entire planet, is often just treated like dirt. It’s time that changed. And it can start in your very own backyard.

I just love reading an article like this. How many times do you sit down at meal with your kids, having forgotten to remind then to wash their hands (or to physically wash their hands yourself, in my case)? For me, it’s almost every meal. It’s just one detail I repeatedly forget.

So I read with great interest this article from the New York Times about dirt, worms and the immune system. I’d heard of the hygiene hypothesis, where studies are showing that interactions with bacteria and viruses actually support the development of a strong immune system, and lessen the likelihood of allergies and asthma. This hypothesis is gaining momentum. Apparently, exposures from birth on are helpful in development of the immune system (and perfectly natural– how many of you have seen your baby sucking on your shoe? Or mouthing your keys?).

When you go out to work in the garden or the flowerbed, do you go out and dig in the dirt? When you fill up your flowerpots, are you filling them with dirt? When you head to the hardware store, do you pick up bags of dirt? When you think or talk about where the green things grow and the dead things go, is the word you use dirt?

If you answered yes, then I am afraid you have been using a very, very DIRTY word. Yes, you have been using perhaps the worst four-letter word in the English agricultural vocabulary. You have been dissing, dismissing, and dirtying the good, clean, productive resource otherwise known as SOIL.

Or at least some folks would say you have.

This may seem like a trivial question of semantics: Is not “dirt” and “soil” the same thing? You know, the stuff you get under your fingernails and on your pants, the stuff you have to wash off your veggies and your kids. Who cares…dirt, soil, it all amounts to the same brown stuff, right?

Well, perhaps. But a great many mindful agriculturalists, gardeners, and other landlubbers (i.e., land lovers) will take the greatest offense if someone uses the word “dirt” to refer to soil, that complex earthy material in which living things grow and thrive and feed.

Discovery Education’s fun and interesting website The Dirt on Soil offers this very useful distinction:

Dirt is what you find under your fingernails. Soil is what you find under your feet. Think of soil as a thin living skin that covers the land. It goes down into the ground just a short way. Even the most fertile topsoil is only a foot or so deep. Soil is more than rock particles. It includes all the living things and the materials they make or change.1

Editor's note: We're happy to introduce the newest member of the Green Options blogging team, Eldad Granot. Eldad owns a sustainable marketing company in Raanana, Israel, and will cover sustainable business and development in his home country.

You, too, may find it rather intriguing to that the book of Genesis states that the origin of Man is the “dust of the ground” or “clay” (in other translations). Well, science has long

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