For most of my life, growing food organically was a matter of blind faith, believing in something I had never seen. I understood it in my head and thought it should work. Like a convert to a new religion, I stumbled, didn't devote enough effort to the ritual of composting, and gave into the temptation to spray weed killer. For years I never tasted the real joy and satisfaction of salvation from traditional methods, though this lesson may be one of the most vital for the future of our families and our Earth.
My true conversion happened over three summers between 1993 and 1995. I wanted to create an 8-metre-by-8-metre (25'x25') vegetable plot in the middle of a stony, dry lawn that had obviously been drenched with chemical herbicides and fertilizers and never received any attention to the heavy soil for years before I moved in.
The secret of life
If you feed the soil, you will grow healthy plants. This is one of the most important secrets to living in harmony with nature. It leads to sustainability, but is ignored by standard agricultural practices. Neglect the soil and you will kill the Earth, inch by precious inch.I had read about a technique for quickly incorporating large amounts of organic matter into the soil and establishing deep beds with a minimum of digging. I accomplished this in 1993 by layering newspaper and uncomposted organic matter directly on the lawn, then plugging plants through holes in the pile. Deep digging could be done more easily after the first season, once the underlying grass had died, the beds had decomposed, and earthworms and plant roots had loosened the soil interface.
For two years I struggled, daunted by the burden of dense, infertile dirt and having to lift stones out of the deep beds one by one. It took time to rebuild soil structure and health, and I saw no progress at first. Tomato wilt, potato beetles and cabbage loopers devastated their respective crops while ground hogs ate all my bean and squash seedlings. The only thing that grew were storage onions, and they were small and feeble.
Seeds of truth
Never having seen an organic garden properly do its business, I almost gave up. Perhaps the only thing that spurred me on was that mid-winter hunger to get my hands dirty again. Devoutly I would pore over the vegetable seed catalogues, ordering up another season of penance. After the box arrived from Stokes Seeds in February,
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