SOIL SOUP.
I was a cook for many years before I became a farmer and if there is one thing I can say about farming, it's that farming––complete with recipes, long, grueling days and urgency––is just cooking with a straw hat in place of a toque. And in both careers, it all starts with ingredients."Your dish is only as good as your ingredients," is a clever and much used adage in the food world. It means you could be the best cook in the world, but if your tomatoes aren't any good then you're not going to make the best tomato soup in the world. Sorry. For farming it's the same thing: your vegetables can only be as good as your soil and your baby plants can only be as good as your soil mix. So when the time came this week to find a few things for our soil mix (homemade potting soil, basically), Hannah and I set out to utilize the best ingredients available and we're excited about no ingredient quite as much as the sand.Sand is an essential part of potting mix. Along with compost, peat moss, soil and a few other amendments, farmers add sand to help aerate. "Adequate aeration," famed farmer Eliot Coleman tells us in The New Organic Grower, "is the key to successful plant growth in any medium." But I have always believed sand does more than just aerate. Sand is mysterious and multitudinous, comprised of millions of tiny pebbles from all different brands of rock and mineral formed over tens of thousands of years then soaked in fertile silt. I've always believed plants like sand for more than just aeration, they use the minerals and the silt and the diversity provided by sand. In honor of that, we wanted to use the best, most alive sand we could find. Out of the creek at the bottom of the hill by our garden, Hannah and I set to work shoveling and sifting this wonderful ingredient...- Jesse.
