December is Dedicated to the Dump Truck

December is dedicated to the dump truck. 

With land excavations mostly done, it was time for the filling to come. The large bulldozer left and the dump trucks arrived, leaving pile upon pile of compost and mulch.  

Meanwhile, a small bulldozer ferried pile upon pile of mulch and soil across the property. For most of the month here in Israel, days were we hot and summery with sapphire-blue skies. Great gardening weather. 

I had no idea how many loads of mulch and soil were involved. Turns out, it was many. There seemed to be a highway of trucks rolling up my neighbor’s driveway in order to access the back of the property. The first time a truck arrived, I called her to ask permission. “Sure,” she replied. “You don’t need to call. Go ahead.”

The truck rumbled in, dumped and left. Then another came. And another. The community yard waste that had piled up over the year also arrived in trucks. One man’s trash is another man’s treasure as the saying goes. It was mulched on site, then we paid for seven huge trucks to dump it on our land. 

Again, trucks went up and down our neighbor’s driveway. We then raked and we raked the mulch across the property until I had blisters on my hands. The land was soon covered with a warm blanket. Green manure taken to the extreme.

Trucks of manure came and went. This went on day after day until mountains of manure filled the back. They were steaming, baking hot inside like an oven. This was a sign that lots of bacterial activity was still going on.

Aside from the mulch mountain, there were two kinds of compost dumped here: a green one and a brown one. The green one was made of clippings and manure and is high in nitrogen, while the brown was mostly decomposed twigs, leaves and wood chips. This pile is carbon rich as opposed to nitrogen rich. The relationship between these two piles was very important as we were soon to learn.

The piles were steaming away, waiting for the no-dig team to arrive on the scene. It was time to build the market garden beds. The permaculture superheroes also arrived. 

Aside from team leader permaculturist Yuval, we had permaculture Ido, who loved cacti and succulents. Shai No-Dig came, popular host of the Israeli No Dig Facebook group. He spoke passionately about soil all day, every day. 

Yigal came, a permaculture farmer who owns a huge parcel of land in Portugal.  And there was “Kiko,” a young guy who ran his own organic vegetable business, as well as Arnon, the gardener-irrigation guy. There was Nachum, a Californian who found Hashem and who loves nature. We even had a young woman, Efrat, work for a few days. Her full-time gig was a carpenter and she was strong!

Then there was us, the older, less informed, farmer wanna be’s. We asked to be put to work. Before I knew it, I was pounding hardened clumps of earth and removing rocks from the beds while Shai and Yuval took out measuring tapes, stakes and ropes. I bashed and I hauled and I sweated. 

Once the beds were outlined with string, we took shovels and filled wheelbarrows with the green manure, then gently dumped them across the beds. Next came careful raking to ensure the soil was straight; higher in the middle and slightly lower on the sides; fluffy but not too much air. 

There was to be minimum disturbance of the soil and there was a lot of discussion about this. They brought a door and then a pipe to gently tamp the beds. Then came the brown compost stage, same treatment. 

The attention and precision taken reminded of Tibetan monks forming a sand mandala. It would have been meditative if my back muscles were not screaming. And if I had trampled on it like the monks destroyed their mandalas to show life’s impermanence, I would have been deigned an impermanent no-dig gardener and escorted off-site.

The dogs, however, broke the golden rule by stepping on the perfect beds, then laying right in the center of them.  They tried out each perfected bed like Goldilocks, leaving paw marks behind them.

Our last job was to mulch in between the beds. Our friends Doug and Paula came from Ra’anana for a full day of digging, wheelbarrowing, and raking. Doug covered the land with a mixture of wheat and nitrogen-fixing clover seeds, a way of further enriching the soil. 

This will soon (as long as we get enough rain) become a cover crop and will take nitrogen from the air, then fix it into its roots. Come spring, we will ‘chop and drop’ it back onto the mulch so when it decomposes, it will add the beneficial nutrients to the soil.

Another responsibility was making the crew lunch. We were sometimes 10 people for lunch and I wanted to serve something healthy and energizing to this hungry strong crew. Day after day, we set the table in the garden and sat around it in the afternoon sun, eating a variety salads and hearty vegetable soups. No Dig Shai blessed us that next year we will be eating vegetables straight from our no-dig beds. 

It felt like a scene from some movie set in Tuscany. Then it was back to work. The irrigation lines were then laid and the rain finally arrived. 

With rain here, I am outside with muddy boots watching that mulch like a hawk for any sign of life. 

The food forest tree holes are dug, mulched, and resting, waiting for company. The beds are ready. They are empty and lonely and eager for life. As soon as the fence goes in, we will plant some winter veggies: possibly spinach, kale, lettuce, radishes, and beets.

Meanwhile, our porcupine may soon be locked into paradise if we can’t dislodge him before the fence is installed. We block up holes with huge boulders and then he extracts them at night, waking me up with his engineering feats.  It sounds like a burglar is downstairs, however burglars are too sly and silent to be so easily detected. I soon realize it is the destructive, fanatical porcupine.

With December coming to a close, the last dump truck has finally left. Silence reigns save for the patter of rain. The much-needed precipitation and accompanying fog work magic, dripping life into the soil, massaging it, prepping it for the warm spring sun and plants soon to come.