#Soil And Dirt

[great-and-small]

Turdus aficionados of Costa Rica please know I love your national bird but this is objectively hilarious

[ketyoulater]

[headspace-hotel]

I don't think it really hits for most people how much topsoil is an incredibly depleted resource that is virtually nonrenewable under current land management practices.

Topsoil you buy at a garden center most likely is not real topsoil, but rather simply compost mixed with sand. Many people have never touched topsoil. In vast swathes of inhabited land, topsoil simply does not exist anymore.

On the lawn care subreddit, people will occasionally be alarmed that their soil feels "mushy" and "soft" after the addition of lots of organic matter, or post something greatly alarmed about the area of "soft" soil in their yard.

These people would shit their pants in awe if they felt the soil in a forest. Their frame of reference for "soil" is so completely, sadly spoiled by compacted, concrete-like lawn dirt. This is a big reason I'm "anti-lawn." Lawns consistently have some of the worst, most devastated soil imaginable.

Topsoil is a LIVING community of microbes, plant roots, decaying organic matter, and perhaps most importantly of all, fungal mycelium. You cannot buy it. You cannot synthesize it. No amount of fertilizer will turn compacted lawn dirt into topsoil. It takes a hundred years to build one inch of topsoil.

In the USA, prairie soil was plowed up to make fields, and we all learned about the Dust Bowl in school, but we don't talk enough about the fact that plowing up the prairies engulfed half the country in devastating dirt storms that turned the sky black and had people choking and coughing up dirt all the time and sweeping deep drifts of dirt out of their houses. Like that happened. Damn.

What we did was something utterly devastating, the near total destruction of hundreds and hundreds of years' worth of an irreplaceable natural resource. And it's happened all over the country. We will never comprehend how much we lost when we lost the topsoil.

[quesadilla-day]

delicious jade 😋yummy yummy 😍

[tendernxss]

quicksand // the story so far

[theohnocorral]

December 5th is WORLD SOIL DAY!!!!!

Happy birthday dirt!

[amphibimations]

Choose your own adventure comic, poll below!

As you stand on the vast moorland, near where the hills end and the bog starts, your mind rushes with anticipation. Today, you are going to RAISE THE DEAD!!!

… More specifically, you’re going to try necromancy on some dead frogs. You’ve been practicing for months, and now that you’re 12 years old, you feel like you should at least be able to make small animal skeletons move. 

First, you’ll need to find some bones. 

All you need to do is search the large, carnivorous pitcher plants and sundews that grow in the area. There are a lot of plants, so it would be easier if you had someone to help you search. This is where your pet golem, Pete, will come in handy. You like to mold him into a different shape every time you remake him. 

This collaborative choose-your-own-adventure comic is called Codex Calluna. A new page will be posted every Saturday evening (est). If you would like to, reblogs mean more people will be able to see this and participate!

Archive blog with only the comic pages: here

[marlynnofmany]

Hey, time to overanalyze magic again. It makes sense to me -- follow closely now -- that earthbending would just be the control of rocks. It's all the minerals that come from the ground, and sure, even some artificially created ones as long as they have the same structure. But just rocks. Not dirt.

Why not, you ask? I invite you to consider what dirt actually is. It's lots of things! Some rock dust, yes, but also crumbled plants, and decomposed animals, and a variety of fungus, and bits of poop from creatures both microscopic and large. Basically, it's a mess of all things organic (plus tiny rocks).

You don't want an earthbender for dirt.

You want a necromancer.

[dk-thrive]

She opened her eyes and then, somewhere inside, opened her eyes again. She heard the grass growing, and the sound of worms below the turf. She could feel the thousands of little lives around her, smell all the scents on the breeze, and see all the shades of the night … She knew exactly where she was, and who she was, and what she was.

— Terry Pratchett, from The Wee Free Men (HarperCollins, 2006) (via Wait - What?)

[linseedling]

Turning Over a New Leaf (To Find Critters Beneath) 🐛

This piece was part of a really fun make-a-thon created by @ohpatpatt! Check it out here

[clunge]

The Story So Far - Roam

[chaotic-archaeologist]

Martha, with all due respect, you do not get to claim the dirt nerd title. That belongs to the archaeologists, and our cousins the geologists/soil sciences.

This is what a REAL dirt nerd looks like

[housecow]

i have a secret and y’all are so gonna think i’m a lil weird for this. but i love soil science so much idc if it has to do with agriculture or conservation or even palesols i love it all!! as a kid i got to regularly look at the soil horizons of the tx coastal plain and when i tell y’all it was FASCINATING. it’s the the truth!

[sorblr]

i coloured the secco doodle for fun :3

[tendernxss]

high regard // the story so far

[boioz]

The Story So Far - High Regard