The Art of Mixing Soil

You might not think very much about the soil that fills your garden bed. Maybe it looks dark brown, you notice if it is dry, or it is just the background to the beautiful flowers and tasty vegetables that grow out of it. Here at Green City Growers we think about your dirt. We spend abundant time on the art of mixing dirt, working with a palette of peat moss, compost, vermiculite, and top soil to create that deep brown that makes your greens happy.

Last week we mixed some quality soil for two new clients: Ula Café in Jamaica Plain and Mathworks, a software company in Natick, MA. After loading up the truck with forty-two bags of compost, an assortment of other soil components, a wheelbarrow, seven wooden raised bed frames, and irrigation tubing, Jessie and I drove to Ula Café where we met her brother Brett to install the beds. Once the beds were laid out, we mixed the soil, pouring the different ingredients onto a tarp, swinging the tarp from side to side so that the peat moss, compost, and vermiculite swirled together in a mess of brown, black, and silver, and dumping the mixture into the beds. We reached our arms into the dirt, mashing up large clumps of compost and looking for buried treasure: a hidden heap of airy vermiculite or a dry pocket of peat moss. Our work done, we ate a lunch of delicious sandwiches at Ula Café where the beds would soon grow a variety of herbs, and moved on to Mathworks where we installed four vegetable beds on the patio outside of the cafeteria.

Yesterday, another summer intern, Marianna, and I spent the morning mixing up two large tubs of soil to repot some zucchini, peppers, and eggplants that had outgrown their small pots. With the heat of summer upon us, the summer crops are raring to go!

-Amy Shmania, summer intern