This Is Not News

Over the last week, I have been ripping up old grass in my back yard and using a tiller to loosen up the soil so that I can spread it around and make it more even. This has involved a lot of me picking up a small clump of grass from a pile of such clumps and trying to shake the loose dirt back onto the ground. (I have filled dozens of bags with these sod clumps, and tried to figure out a way to make an effective “Kneel Before Sod” joke. I have not been successful.) During this process, it occurred to me that I didn’t necessarily have a full grasp of what made dirt dirt, as opposed to dust or sand or what have you. After some fiddling around on Wikipedia and the rest of the web, I found soil-net.com. I have, er, just started digging in to the site, but there’s a lot of interesting information there to help remind us that when we’re shoveling that soil around, we’re sticking our hands right into decomposed organic matter combined with mineral particles.