The Other Carbon Story: Why Soil Matters as Much as the Plants Above It
In the first post in this series, we traced the path of carbon from the atmosphere into the physical structure of plants — the sugars, the cellulose, the lignin-rich wood that makes a tree trunk both strong and carbon-dense. But as impressive as a mature tree is as a carbon vault, it's actually the soil beneath it that holds more. Roughly 60% of the carbon stored in a landscape is underground. More importantly, carbon stored in the soil tends to stay stored — stable for centuries or millennia rather than decades. Knowing how that happens, and what undoes it, changes the way you think about managing a garden.
Garden as a Process: Working with Nature
In our task-driven lives, it’s tempting to treat everything like a checklist. Paint the room. Clean the garage. Done. But gardens aren’t like painted walls. They’re not static, finished projects. Gardens live, breathe, grow, and change—sometimes in ways we don’t expect.
Instead of trying to control every aspect, what if we approached the garden as a process?
New Old School Tool For Decompacting Soil
Over my first year of gardening for other people, one of the biggest internal conflicts I have had is how to balance the need to amend and de-compact urban soils vs minimizing disturbance of the existing soil which has the potential to ruin soil structure and reinvigorate the seed bank (causing previously dormant seeds to germinate and cause weed issues).