Water Your Soil, Not Your Plants
A suggestion for gardeners and humans at large
The summer of 2022 was a a dreaded drought year for many Mid-Atlantic gardeners. Sadly, the spring of 2023 is bringing more of the same, with many ill-equipped gardeners already begging for relief in the face of relentless sun. I’d like to offer some insight about how to think about these challenges.
Before I continue, I just have to say that I love sunny & dry weather. It kickstarts my mood. Yeah, yeah, I have to water the garden. But I also don’t need to mow the lawn every four days. And I’ll take that deal every time.
For those without automatic watering systems (read: most casual gardeners) or free time (read: most middle class working folks with families), drought can be a severe and brutal sentence, imposed on the innocent by an aloof and callous sky judge. Garden soil gradually dehydrates, as the merciless demands of modern life excise “watering the garden” from the daily routine. It is a challenging feedback loop: The drier the soil becomes, the more difficult it becomes to rehydrate. Rushed and inconsistent watering sessions become almost pointless, as drought conditions deepen. The drought eventually steals a growing season, as the soil dies and the plants die with it.
Sounds depressing. But it doesn’t need to be this way — if we understand that gardening is about soil and not about plants.
If you believe that Soil = Dirt + Fertilizer, this is the original sin of gardening, and we will seek forgiveness and re-education another time. Serious gardeners understand that soil is in some sense a living system. Most problems that new or casual gardeners experience are deeply intertwined with a basic misunderstanding of soil. For starters, soil is not “dirt”:
Dirt is dead; soil is alive.
Dirt accumulates randomly where it ought not; soil is intentional.
Dirt disables the proper function of things; soil enables the proper functioning of plants.
Dirt + Fertilizer = Dirty Fertilizer, not soil.
What do I mean when I say that soil is alive? Surely I don’t mean that soil is a living, breathing entity that can respire, reproduce and ruminate? Well, no, with all respect to my panpsychist friends, I don’t mean that. Soil is not alive in the sense of how we view life. But soil is nevertheless best understood as being alive. Soil is alive in the sense that all good soil — soil that causes plants to thrive — is an ecosystem that lives, breathes and constantly transforms. And that ecosystem most definitely includes hundreds of components that are truly alive in every sense of the word. From earthworms and roly polies to bacteria, fungi and yeasts, healthy soil teems with life.
This picture diverges from how most new gardeners conceptualize soil. We are trained to think of soil as an inanimate substance — the ground we trod upon, something that is just “there” …or some inert stuff that we buy in a plastic bag at a big box store. We think of it as dirt — brown, dead dirt. But soil isn’t dirt.
Forgive a brief detour: Astute members of my garden group might cry foul. “Hey Tom, every winter you tell us to microwave our seed-starting soil, precisely to kill everything. Doesn’t that qualify as dead soil?”
I’m glad you asked. I do indeed recommend that folks microwave seed-starting soil, particularly those who, like me, make their own from garden compost. The reason is twofold: First, seed-starting trays are not complete, balanced ecosystems. In fact, they are quite isolated, unable to reach any point of equilibrium or self-maintenance, and therefore vulnerable to imbalances and infestations. Second, the soil in this case is not permanent; it is a temporary host for seedlings that need only do its job for a few weeks. It will eventually dissolve into a much larger soil ecosystem that will, in a sense, raise it from the dead. But for seedling purposes, it is “better off dead”.
Q. What does this have to do with watering?
A. Everything.
When you water properly, you water soil, not plants. The plants are watered by the soil; the soil is watered by you (in a drought, anyway). Casual gardeners and plant owners generally do not see it this way. They see droopy plants. They deduce that the plant needs water — which is true in the most basic sense. But they fail to see the chain of events that forges reality, as opposed to the human misconception of what is actually going on. The closer we get to dealing with reality, the more effective and successful we will be …in gardening and in life.
You need to water your soil for your plants, but not only for your plants. Remember, you want living soil, not dead, fertilized dirt. All of the stuff that makes your soil alive and useful needs water too. If those things die, your soil dies. And when your soil dies, your plants die with it. You won’t see that latter death immediately, as the plants get by on the rehydrated goo of whatever was left in the soil before its spirit moved on. But it will happen. The plants begin to look sad. Bad guy bugs and diseases begin to appear. Then well-meaning people on the internet tell you it’s a fertilizer problem. This is the progression into garden perdition.
The true wage of drought is dead soil, not dead plants. There is only one salvation from this fate in a drought, and that is consistent watering until the real rains return. And as I admitted in the beginning of this bit of self-indulgence, that isn’t easy for many people. I can tell you that it is much easier if you diagnose the situation early on, and water regularly before the soil reaches an ICU-type situation. That is, it is much easier to keep a soil hydrated than it is to rehydrate it. But we will talk about watering techniques and possible shortcuts in a separate post.
Finally, I will offer one bit of encouragement. There is hope for virtually all soil, even when dead. Over the longer term, soil is remarkable, resilient stuff. Water and good quality compost can perform miracles, even when all hope is lost. If your time is short, and tears well in your eyes as you watch the drought steal your plants and your soil from you, don’t let it get you down. The rains will return, your soil can rise again, and there will again be joy across the land before you know it.