Healing Bruised Soil
hoeing as restoring breath to the earth
“Nothing would give up life:
Even the dirt kept breathing a small breath.”1 - Theodore Roethke
“The regulation of the breath is connected with the discovery, or preparation of, the philosopher's stone.”2 - Rudolf Steiner
We have sandy loam at our farm. While this has enormous advantages, whenever there’s heavy rain, the fine particles have a tendency to collapse the topmost layer of soil. Why is this significant?
Collapsed soil—even if sandy—quickly becomes anaerobic (starved of oxygen). When this happens, byproducts of anaerobic sour fermentation arise, which are often toxic to our plants but which pathogenic fungi love. Many germinating weeds especially have an affinity for the sour environment of collapsed anaerobic soil. Soil often tends to “collapse” if left to itself — just as a rock falls if you drop it.
As soon as I’m able after a rain, I hoe even when I don’t see any new weeds. Why? Because if I don’t, that collapsed soil causes all sorts of weed seeds to germinate. By hoeing before the weeds have that chance, I restore the outermost layer of the soil to a dry but breathable “skin.” Imagine washing your skin to unclog its pores or perhaps exfoliating your skin. We dispel the hardened crust so that what is alive can breathe.
Consider how Rudolf Steiner describes “a thoroughly wet winter, followed by a thoroughly wet spring. Then the Moon-forces will enter the earth too strongly. The earth will become too much alive.”3 On a macrocosmic scale, this can happen when the soil becomes water-logged and anaerobic over winter. Still, it can also happen on a smaller scale after heavy rain in any garden in which the water becomes stagnant. Water in the earth is more dead than water above the earth, as Steiner explains:
“This is true both of warmth and of air. They both receive a tiny spark of life as they pass into the earth. It is different in the case of water and of the solid earth element itself. Both of these have less life inside the Earth than they have when above its surface. They become “more dead,” they lose something of their life they had outside.”
This may seem confounding, but it’s really quite simple. If you bring warmth or air into the soil, those elements want to go up back to the atmosphere because warmth naturally rises. Think of swimming underwater and exhaling a lungful of air: the bubbles spontaneously rise to the surface. Something similar is at work when you bring air down into the moist earth — it wants to return to the cosmos. Now, our air is mostly nitrogen — about 78 percent — and its willful movements are permeated by astrality. In fact, The nitrogen in our air is called “inert” because it’s not doing much on a chemical reaction level, but nitrogen does all sorts of things as a body of air. Most of our weather is because of the dynamics of nitrogen! “The astral element is everywhere, and nitrogen, the bearer of the astral, is everywhere; it hovers in the air as a dead element, but the moment it enters into the soil it comes to life again.”4 Even spiderwebs are woven out of the astral world — spiders always build their webs where there is a prevailing draft which aids them catching prey. You could almost think of spiders as aerial “fishers” who have the wisdom to know precisely where to cast their nets into invisible currents and so catch their prey more easily. If you notice how various spiderwebs change orientation during the seasons, you can watch a sort of physical “veil” over these astral streams. As weather patterns tend to move from high-pressure areas to low-pressure areas, the air in the earth is under more pressure than the air above, so the air below the earth wishes to rise — air is “more alive” under the earth, whereas water and earth become “more dead” and are quite happy to settle down and stop moving altogether.
On the other hand, if you have moisture above the earth, the water always wants to fall and “find its level.” Warmth and air also have their own level, but it is up in the heavens, whereas water and earth are more attracted by gravity than they are by levity. Imagine a helium balloon in a house, it wishes to go up to the ceiling. Likewise, if you light a candle, the warmth rises. But if you boil a kettle of water, the steam rises and will condense and drip back downward. With the earth element, it is even simpler: hold a rock and let go of it, and it falls.
Alan Chadwick puts it like this: “But you see here’s the very identity of our whole procedure in the garden: that we water not really to make wet. To wet just temporarily, so that it should dry, so that we can water again. And the watering is so that it should dry, and the drying is so that we should water. Here you’ve got this metamorphosis change, going through the area of discontinuity.”5 The plant’s very growth depends on water and water evaporating through its growth. If the air were just as humid as the soil, water couldn’t evaporate, and plants couldn’t exhale. In tropical areas, this actually can happen, and plants suffer terribly.
If a soil has become too deadened, one of the first steps must be deep ripping, cracking open the subsoil so that dynamics of air, light, and warmth can permeate freely. As Steiner says, “Lucifer is connected with the experience of breathing, of the in-breathing and the out-breathing.”6 And so, by cultivating soil, we are employing a “light-bearing” activity to maintain proper breathing. Neither overly manipulated, nor simply left to its own devices, we help the soil breath consciously.
It is as if the fluidic airy atmosphere — air is warm and moist — dominated by nitrogen is constantly being stirred, influenced, and mobilized by the gigantic gravitational fields of planets. The weather itself is affected by the planets, but not in a superstitious way. Everything that is happening in the outer reaches of our cosmos changes the currents of movement in our nitrogenous atmosphere.
“Above all nitrogen knows all those secrets of which we know nothing in an ordinary way, of the planets Saturn, Sun, Moon and so on, and their influences upon the form and life of plants, of which I told you yesterday, and in the preceding lectures. Nitrogen that is everywhere abroad, knows these secrets very well. It is not at all unconscious of what emanates from the stars and becomes active in the life of plants and of the earth.”7
Imagine the movements of your breath hovering over the water in a bucket. Those ripples affect the entire body of water. Likewise, the subtle movements of enormous planetary bodies influence the “pool” of our atmosphere. By opening the soil and allowing this air to permeate it, we aid the influence of the outer planets, communicating their influence to our gardens. A collapsed soil becomes severed from the cosmos, so it is always our task to help overcome erosion and compaction. Maria Thun found that hoeing in the evening helps moisten the earth by stirring up the cool earth and making it receptive to the blanket of humidity that settles nightly, even in deserts. By contrast, hoeing in the morning helps to release excessive water. Generally, if you are hoeing to manage weeds, the Earth is overabundant in “Moon” forces, and morning hoeing is ideal. By contrast, if it is very dry and you do not have a lot of weeds, hoeing in the evening is like moistening a sponge. You can irrigate your beds by hoeing in the evening. Alan Chadwick spoke of this as “fertilizing” with your hoe. A hoe is not merely a weapon against undesired weeds, it is a magical tool for generating greater fertility.
Cultivation introduces lightness to the soil: air, levity, and luminosity.
When we introduce warmth and air into the soil, we create an energy differential that spontaneously wishes to return to its source. What is the purpose of plowing and hoeing? It’s not killing weeds, though it does this too. The purpose of cultivating the soil is to bring light into the earth. Cultivation introduces lightness to the soil: air, levity, and luminosity. In an alchemical sense “air” signifies not only the gaseous element but surface area. “The astral, on the other hand, is stimulated — to begin with — by breathing.”8 When we cultivate the good earth, we introduce airiness to it, quickening the deadened water to new life.
As Steiner suggests, “Now if we compare the earth surface with the human diaphragm we must say: The individuality represented by our farm, having the earth surface for its diaphragm has its head under the earth.”9 While this is not quite precise, it is useful for practical purposes. When you see soil get a crust, especially after a heavy rain, imagine that such a soil is holding its breath like a petulant child refusing to breathe and her face turning blue. In intensely anaerobic soils, red clay turns blue. Normally clay is red because oxidized iron changes color, but in intensively anaerobic conditions, clay appears blue, like blue steel. Collapsed soil cannot breathe properly. In Steiner’s medical lectures, he describes asthma as an overreaching of the etheric body that overwhelms the astral body — which is to say, the natural flow of breathing is immobilized by too much ethericity in the wrong location. One might say that a soil that is unable to breathe naturally has a kind of asthma.
Similarly, Alex Podolinsky writes, “it can be clearly shown that Earth has asthma. An asthma sufferer can breathe in, whereas there is difficulty with breathing out. Earth is exactly in this situation.”10 Alan Chadwick suggested in an interview that the greatest problem in the world today is compaction. Rudolf Steiner says that “the first and most essential activity of the astral body within the airy element is breathing.”11 In the garden, one can see an intensity of astrality where the breeze is intensified. Bees and pollinators astralize the atmosphere by stirring it to additional movement that it would not itself have willed. When soil develops a crust, the “diaphragm” of the soil seizes up and its natural rhythm is obstructed.
The kind of organic matter produced by anaerobic fermentation is peat-like and slimy — it usually stinks. Such sour fermentation creates all sorts of poisonous byproducts that stunt root development but encourage pathogenic fungi and pests. As Rudolf Steiner is quoted in an appendix to the Agriculture Course, “Peat moss as a means of soil improvement was more than once rejected by Rudolf Steiner. It is, he said, neither suitable as manure nor for improving the physical condition of the soil. We ought to add humus again and again in every form instead: as compost, leaf mould, etc.”12 It is primarily aerobic compost that we are seeking in biodynamic agriculture, which produces a more neutral pH humus than acid fermentation.
When the soil collapses after rain, it cannot breathe properly. It is advisable to use shallow mechanical cultivation as soon as the soil is dry enough to work beneficially. By doing so, stagnation is avoided. According to Chinese medicine, “Pain is stagnation.” When we hoe judiciously, we relieve the suffering of the soil, like massaging around an injured joint or an injection overcoming an asthma attack.
It is the task of the gardener not to make plants grow but to facilitate flow. None of my efforts can force a plant to grow. The life that a plant possesses — or rather expresses — is not something we create. That life streams in from the cosmos. All we can do is work with these primal rhythms and remove obstructions where they occur. Christopher Bramford writes, “The guiding principle of alchemy is the efficacious, curative, and omnipotent intervention of Unity—that is, Spirit—to overcome the pathology of the world, its death principle.”13 And this is biodynamics: the dynamics of life — the flowing orchestration of the cosmic music of living.
As Goethe says,
“I think of the earth and its atmosphere as being like a great living organism, perpetually inhaling and exhaling. When the earth inhales, it draws the atmosphere downwards, so that it approaches the earth's surface, condenses, and forms clouds and rainfall. This is the state I call ‘water affirmation’; if it were to persist for an inordinate length of time, the earth would be drowned. But this the earth does not allow; it exhales again and lets the water vapours escape upwards, where they are dissipated throughout the upper atmosphere and become so rarefied that not only does the sun shine through in all its brightness, but the eternal darkness of outer space appears to us as a vivid blue.
This latter atmospheric state I call ‘water negation’. In the other, contrary state, not only does water fall frequently from above, but the moisture on the earth cannot evaporate and dry out. In this state, however, not only is there no water coming from above, but the moisture on the earth escapes upwards and evaporates; which means that if this condition were to persist for an inordinate length of time the earth, even in the absence of sunshine, would be in danger of drying up and withering.”14
It's our task to regulate the earth’s breathing. Steiner says: “Humanity’s ascent takes place through the overcoming of physical love, the regulation of the breathing process, and the development of kundalini light.”15 The work remains constant, but the essence of good gardening is removing obstacles to facilitate healthy flow, particularly that of light and air to the head of the plant world. It’s that simple, though the obstructions are always different in each situation. But there’s nothing more difficult than simplicity.
Theodore Roethke, “Root Cellar”
R. Steiner, Supersensible Knowledge, Lecture XI (GA55, 14 March 1907, Berlin)
R. Steiner, Agriculture Course, Lecture VI (GA327, 14 June, 1924 Koberwitz)
R. Steiner, Agriculture Course, Lecture III (GA327, 11 June 1924, Koberwitz)
Alan Chadwick, Man, Nature and the Garden, Part 3, New Market, Virginia, 1979 http://www.alan-chadwick.org/html%20pages/lectures/virginia_lectures/chadwick-lecture-virginia-4-3.html
R. Steiner, The Balance in the World and Man, Lucifer and Ahriman (GA158, Dornach, November 20, 1914)
R. Steiner, Agriculture Course, Lecture III (GA327, 11 June 1924, Koberwitz)
R. Steiner, Anthroposophy, An Introduction (GA234, 2 February 1924, Dornach)
R. Steiner, Agriculture Course, Lecture II (GA327, 10 June 1924, Koberwitz)
Alex Podolinsky, BioDynamics: Agriculture of the Future, pg. 5. This topic is Discussed in detail in BioDynamic Agriculture Introductory Lectures Volume 3, Lecture 3.
Rudolf Steiner, Anthroposophy, an Introduction (GA234, 3 February 1924, Dornach)
Rudolf Steiner, Agriculture Course, Appendix, https://rsarchive.org/Lectures/GA327/English/RSPC1938/AG1938_appendix.html
Christopher Bramford, “One the All” in Green Hermeticism: Alchemy and Ecology, pg. 45.
Goethe as quoted by Johann Peter Eckermann, Conversations with Goethe, pg. 200.
Rudolf Steiner, Esoteric Lessons I, Number 9, (GA266, Berlin, 5-6-1906)