You can cook dirt?

For me, food was always an afterthought. "Ugh. Hungry again. I'll solve that and get back to what I was doing."

Then I read this book from the 70s by a Japanese farmer who's like the grandfather of permaculture. I wish I could have met him. His name was Masanobu Fukuoka.

Fukuoka-san was walking and noticed rice growing wild. It was thriving. He wondered how much he could grow that way without flooding the paddy or starting seedlings. He soon learned he could yield just as much with less effort, and that was just the beginning. He found all sorts of clever ways to avoid industrializing his farm by paying attention to how things work. He was a hacker.

He called it "do nothing farming." I live in a different climate with different soil. I probably won't be growing buckwheat or rice, but I can apply his philosophy of paying attention and harmonizing instead of dominating the life around me.

I figured, "I'm going to need a bunch of dirt." Not soil, per se, but compost as fertilizer. The soil is dense clay here. It doesn't absorb water well.

You can actually cook dirt. Well, you can "cook" organic matter by composting it, which is to intentionally accelerate decomposition while eliminating odors and weed seeds and other unwanted things. There's more too it than I'd imagined, but not too much.

So, I'm Farmer Bingham now, I guess.

I've a few hundred gallons of matter cooking down to teensy pieces out back. I've selected a patch of ground for planting and smothered what was growing there with plastic so I can enrich the soil.

Soon I'll be amending that bed with my compost and starting some veggies and fruits from seed. There's a lot to know. I made some farmer friends and I'm hunting for a scobe so I can ferment kombucha. My collection of bottles for that is growing. I'm hoping to branch out into yoghurt and pickles and kraut too. I love that stuff.