The Alchemy of Making Black Gold

Each spring my thoughts turn towards dirt. I get down on my knees and run my hands through it, searching for worms. I squeeze it to see if it crumbles or keeps.

I go to the compost piles: the quick-turning one that takes in kitchen scraps and the slow-churning one that eats yard waste.

I shovel out spades-full, using it to fill in trenches for beets and parsnips. I mix it into the lazy bed for the potatoes. I make new gardens.

Dirt is the foundation.

And, for me, it starts in the sky, far out of reach ...




… with the trees.

My suburban home is surrounded by them. Which, come fall, can be overwhelming. Each tree sheds at a different time, laying down layer after layer of leaves, and I barely keep up with raking.




Just the thought of bagging them is exhausting. So, out of laziness a few years ago, I dragged them with a tarp and dumped them in a corner of my backyard, hoping they would go away.

Maybe, they'd turn into soil which I could use in my gardens.

A friend soon shot this down. They're oak leaves, he explained, which contain tannin. The acid in tannin would poison my plants.

To protect my laziness, I needed to debunk this. And, luckily, I soon did. I discovered that tannin dilutes out over time, especially when mixed with other yard waste.

Not only that but oak leaves can improve soil, as Kentucky State University research and extension horticulturist, Ward Upham, said: “Oak leaves can become a good source of soil nutrition.”

Yet, Upham warned that the leaves can take a while to breakdown. Thankfully, a lawnmower solves this problem.

Here’s what I do: I rake the leaves into piles and then run the mower over them a few times, shredding them into a fluffy mix of tiny pieces, which I layer into the compost pile with other yard waste.

I make sure to wet and flip the pile throughout the year, helping the material breakdown.

Then, before winter, I cap it by tossing some dirt from the sides over the top. The swollen hill--filled with leaves and grass and forsythia branches and sod--cooks for a couple of years and then pours out black gold, perfect for plants.

The late poet Seamus Heaney captured the joy of cutting into such fine earth (for him it was peat in the bogs of Ireland) in his poem “Digging”:

            The cold smell of potato mould, the squelch and slap
            Of soggy peat, the curt cuts of an edge

Yes, more than the need for compost for the plants and more than the need for dirt for the new garden--there is just that sound, the slide of the spade slipping into soft earth.