docu: Kiss the Ground

Recently I have been on a bit of a documentary kick – all things environmental. I was scrolling through Netflix options, trying to decide on my next watch, but it was already 21:00 when I saw “Seaspiracy” come up and I decided it was way too late to go down that dark hole before bed. I wanted something motivating, inspiring. Something real, but also something that excites action. Enter: Kiss the Ground.

Basically, every soil-nerd should watch this film (also if you’re not one!). I’ve been interested in soil and the health of my backyard soil ever since starting my first compost bin in 2012. I geek out over soil, worm poo, and regeneration, so naturally I was going to like this film. And I think it’s leaving Netflix soon, so you should jump on that right now.

Narrated by Woody Harrelson (if you’re a fan), this documentary discusses how the health of our soil impacts our planet, how we’ve been depleting it ever since modernizing agriculture (think Dust Bowl a la 1930s) with monocultures, pesticides, and bare soil, and what we can do moving forward (including what some ranchers and farmers are already doing), namely REGENERATION. When we understand the soil cycle, plants, and how everything is interconnected, we will better understand how to care for our farms, ranches, backyard gardens, and the land in general.

I won’t get into the details (because I want you to watch it), but by the end of the film, I had a surge of motivation to basically FIX THE EARTH RIGHT NOW. Irrational? Perhaps! But my point is that I was inspired to do more, which is precisely what I had hoped for. I am already gardening, companion planting, composting, and vermicomposting. I experiment with compost tea, natural pest-control, and preserving the food that I grow. This year I experimented with drying and using herbs for the first time. So there I sat, tapping my foot: what else can I really do?!

Well, my teacher-self would say: there is always room for improvement! It’s true. So, I sat on that for a few days.

And then I got it: my town STILL does not have municipal composting. Smaller towns all around us have been doing curbside pick-up for organic material since last year, and my town still is not (come ON, Cranbrook). I reached out to a friend who lives close-by, to ask her if she is currently composting. She said she had not been able to set up her new bin yet that she hoped to switch from the last one, so currently she was not composting. I asked her if she would save her scraps for me to compost in my bins. She was super excited about this arrangement, so now I am composting for THREE households in my two-bin composting system in the backyard. That’s one more thing I’m doing now that I wasn’t doing before.

I managed to secure a manure source this year. Using this manure from a friend, I have been able to keep the compost pile hot and decomposing, as well as using it in my garden beds as fertilizer. That’s one more thing I’m doing now that I wasn’t doing before.

The next step for me is cover crops. If I don’t want to lose top soil, nutrients, and water retention, I need to look into cover crops and nitrogen-fixing plants. Soil wants to grow stuff, it keeps the cycle going. That way I can bring nutrients back to my soil, keep it in place, improve water retention, and have natural mulch materials for next year. My next step is to figure out which plants I can grow with our challenging growing season. Oh, it’s fun, isn’t it?

Anyway. Go watch it. Even if you don’t feel inspired after, you’ll learn something important.

My only criticism of this film would be the low representation of Indigenous voices, as well as BIPOC farmers and ranchers; Indigenous communities were the original stewards of this land, and there are incredible BIPOC farmers out there doing incredible things, using the methods of their ancestors, which I think would have been invaluable not only to this film, but to our moving into the future of healthy soil, land, and water. It requires effort from all of us, which means we can all learn something from each other; we’re all roommates on this planet!

In love and compost,

Nadine