Dirt! The Movie

I checked out The 11th Hour DVD from the library and watched it again. As I Googled for the speakers in the film, I stumbled upon Dirt! The Movie, which is available for viewing on Hulu.com (free of charge in case you are not familiar with Hulu.com). I am no stranger to dirt, but it is always good to see a full length film to remind myself what I am doing is important even though it may be labor intensive or seem trivial at times.

There are several environmentalists who appear in both The 11th Hour and Dirt! The Movie, including Paul Stamets, an American mycologist, author, and advocate of bioremediation and medicinal mushrooms. Being an amateur mycologist myself, I am somewhat familiar with his work and surprised how often I see him in documentaries.

The movie is informative and cute. Some of us know that fertile dirt is alive and full of organisms even though most of them are invisible to the naked eyes. For that reason, there is a little animated character in the film to symbolize living dirt as shown in the image above.

I was also pleasantly surprised to see El Cerrito being mentioned in the film! Kevin Rowell and Marisha Farnsworth of The Natural Builders are featured in the film as they are laying the dirt floor in the bedroom of their cinder-block garage home. I guess their home is in El Cerrito.  The floor they install in Dirt! is made of earth excavated from beneath the topsoil, amended for a proper ratio of sand and clay and fortified with horse manure. That last ingredient may dissuade the squeamish, but horse manure really is amazing stuff. If you want your fruit and vegetables to grow well, add some horse manure to the soil. It doesn't even stink. It's basically digested hay since that's what horses eat mostly.

Kevin Rowell and Marisha Farnsworth

The film also interviews Alice Waters of Chez Panisse Restaurant, who started Edible Schoolyards in Berkeley. I wish I was introduced to growing food and the magic of dirt earlier in life, but I can doing quite well passing the information to others who are just now beginning to take an interest.

Cuttings

It's 90 degrees today. This is too hot for me to be out there fighting the weeds but perfect for working in the green house. I clipped some red monkey flowers, Provence lavender, Spanish lavender, rosemary, and Roma tomatoes. I will start with these since I have plenty of them. I purchased 3 pots of monkey flowers 2 years ago, but only one of them survived. The surviving bush is doing really well, so I am going to see if I can expand the monkeys. Master Ken, my mentor, always makes it seem so easy to grow anything. He also makes his cuttings and pruning in an amazing speed. It's all second nature to him. It took me almost an hours just to get these cuttings ready for rooting.


I don't t think any of my peach cuttings had rooted from a couple months ago. I also didn't use rooting hormone on those cuttings. This time I got a bottle of rooting hormone. Since I am trying to keep my cost down, I decided to make my own rooting medium instead of buying perlite. I know it has to be light and airy so the roots can grow easily, so I mixed some potting soil (1/3) with completely dried horse manure mixed with wood shavings (2/3). I misted the mixture with the water bottle.


I dip each cutting into the rooting hormone powder then stick it into the rooting medium. Tomatoes are supposed to root very easily, so I am skipping rooting hormone on them. After every cutting is in place, I mist everything thoroughly. Since I don't have a sprinkler system in this makeshift greenhouse, I will be misting these cuttings several times a day whenever possible. If everything goes well, they should root in 3 to 5 weeks.