Ah, spring . . . time for gardeners to play in the dirt, or, in some cases, with their dirt.
Some gardeners obsess on getting just the right combination of organic matter and nutrients. They sprinkle in kelp from Alaska and phosphate from Florida. They brew up compost spiced with rabbit manure.
Some turn designer dirt into a business. Others do it just for the pleasure of watching vegetables or roses rise from their specially brewed soil.
Lucrecia Herr is one of the fanatics, though she has toned it down in recent years.
“The joke used to be family members would ask me, ‘What do you want for your birthday?’ ” Herr said. “I’d say, ‘I want a dump truck full of horse manure.’ ”
Herr made a deal with a private business that picks up lawn clippings and horse droppings in the Camden, S.C., area. She used truckloads of this rich, organic material to build the base for her raised, terraced vegetable garden.
“There are parts of Columbia where the soil is nice,” said Herr, who lives in the North Trenholm, S.C., area. “But where I am, it’s not. I’ve added gobs of stuff.”
Ground-up leaves from her yard and the organic leftovers from her kitchen help keep the bed’s loamy soil the consistency of a moist chocolate cake. “You reach down and pick up a handful, and it’s pretty incredible, if I do say so,” Herr said.
But that’s not enough. She tills in alfalfa pellets, a chicken manure product and lime to keep the acidity just right.
“Let’s face it,” Herr said. “My vegetables cost a fortune. If I calculated the cost per eggplant, it would be crazy.”
Val Hutchinson’s shady yard in Northeast Richland, S.C., isn’t as conducive to vegetables, so she concentrates on shade plants. More accurately, she concentrates on the compost that makes those plants thrive.
Her fanaticism began when she took a master gardener class in 1994. The section on composting captured her imagination.
“I became a compost Nazi,” Hutchinson said. “I was so careful about what I would put in my compost pile.” She checked the ingredients on food packages, not to see if they were good for her, but to see whether the leftovers were safe for her compost pile.
A trip to England enlightened her on more laid-back composting. Soon, she dumped the chipper-shredder used for grinding up tree limbs and turned to a quieter tool — rabbits.
She keeps her furry friends in raised cages, allowing the nitrogen-rich feces and urine to drop into her compost piles. When she changes the hay in the cages, it goes into the compost piles to add cellulose. Thousands of worms do their stuff in the bins.
The rich byproduct — she dubs it Fancy Hare Do — helps explain why nearly every inch of the Richland County, S.C., council member’s yard is covered by something green.
Not everyone has the time or knowledge to create such ideal soil. Fortunately, entrepreneurs offer shortcuts.
Jimmy Sharpe at Dixie Landscape sells truckloads of Dixie Mix, a mushroom compost-based soil local gardeners swear by. “We’ve had a lot of people ask us what’s in it,” Sharpe said. “I always say, ‘You can’t go to KFC and ask for their secret recipe.’ “
