The Season Ends ~ A New One Begins

 

Are these fields just sitting here empty in the Winter? What’s going on? This week we will be planting the winter cover crop of rye grass. Soon there will be bright green sprouts of rye everywhere, which continues to grow through the Winter. I’ve read where each individual rye grass has over 3 miles of tiny roots! These keep the soil loose, and when the rye grass is tilled in in the spring will provide lots of organic
matter that will decompose and provide nutrients for the crops. (Another name for
cover crop is “green manure”) So what else is going on?

While we are sitting out the cold Winter waiting for next years veggies, there is an
army of over 5 Sextillion earthworms, nematodes, beetles, centipedes and other soil
creatures hard at work for us! (one sextillion is 1,000,000,000,000,000,000) How did I come up with that number? We have at least 3 ft of topsoil on 15 acres of cultivated land, which equals 1,960,200 cu ft. Which equals over 111 trillion teaspoons. Most estimates average a number of 50 milllion of these creatures in 1 teaspoon of organically managed soil. In addition to that, there are estimates of over 50 billion bacteria per teaspoon as well – I’m not even going to try to figure that out! So it is a regular work factory going on in the soil, and it never stops.

They are working hard to process the soil, make it healthy, and enable the plants that we use to feed ourselves to thrive. And guess what? As long as I’ve been digging around in the soil, I have never noticed armies of nematodes doing battle with the earthworms, territorial disputes between centipedes and beetles, or little puffs of soil bombs coming up from the soil. The nightcrawlers do not feel they should “own” more territory or have more status because they are “management”, nor do they withhold their work for the common good to gain politcal power, and the bacterias do not try to overrun the earthworms because they outnumber them. They also do not withhold the bounty that they have helped to create from those who are impoverished.

 My human self, looking out at all that from my empire of tractors, paper, pens, and electronics feels humbled. Because my higher-life-form self cannot do what they do, and without them, could not live, just like I could not live without other humans.