By Felder Rushing

Gardening Columnist

Once again, I got drawn into deep research on what turned out to be a newly repackaged ancient concept.

This myth-busting horticulturist weighs everything, more out of curiosity than being fractious; I want to know what is good about the bad, and what is bad about the good, deconstructing fairy tales with facts. Examples abound of things that can be seen as both positive and negative, regardless of how they affect us personally: Pruning crape myrtles, tolerating low-growing flowers in a mow-what-grows lawn, using natural or synthetic pesticides, leaving big spiders alone…

It especially applies to trendy advice from garden gurus looking for angles. For example, without trying to over- or under-think any of this, or pooh-pooh the earnest efforts of more serious gardeners, “permaculture” is just modern-packaged good garden sense practices like composting, planting cover crops, mulching, collecting rainwater, attracting pollinators, reducing pesticide use, and the like.

Composting? Doesn’t require a lot of science; it’s just a dedicated pile where we recycle garden debris and kitchen scraps rather than paying someone to haul it away, then paying to haul in new stuff in from afar. Heck, this happens all the time in the woods as fallen leaves get recycled from right on top of the ground, albeit much more slowly. Vermicompost? Dried worm poop.

The ancient but newly popular technique called hugelkultur is just piling up fallen limbs, branches, and leaves, tossing on a little dirt, then planting in and around it. Biointensive or square-foot gardening is mostly just mixing stuff up in small spaces instead in uniform, space-wasting rows. And raised beds don’t have to sit on top of the ground, they are actually better part sunk and part raised. And they don’t have to have the sides shored up except for convenience or looks. Planting for pollinators just means having lots of flowers and tolerating a few caterpillars.

But a couple of newish head-scratching terms are making waves: humus, and biochar. I hear and read about their benefits all the time now. However, what is sold as humus is technically not humus, just finished compost. Real humus is completely degraded compost, broken down to its most elemental form, which takes a long, long time.

You’ve seen humus when digging down into undisturbed dirt; it’s that mysterious, compacted, sticky but crumbly brown layer. Taking years to accumulate, it’s what is left over after worms, bacteria, and fungi have used all they can get out of it. I have found it in the dirt beneath my compost pile, after digging out all the most useful stuff. Is it useful in a garden? Not exactly – again, real humus isn’t sold anywhere, and good compost works as well anyway.

Biochar, a stable soil amendment like ground-up charcoal, is made by smoldering wood and other garden debris in a pit covered with dirt to keep it burning but without enough oxygen for flames to turn it into ash. It holds nutrients and water, and keeps carbon out of the atmosphere, but is mostly beneficial in really poor, degraded soils. Is it worth a try? If you can afford it, sure, but I’m not convinced it’s practical for small-scale home gardeners with decent dirt who just use mulch and compost.

Not knocking any of these new-fangled/ancient approaches. If you’ve got the urge to turn home gardening into a complicated Olympic sport or are concerned with sequestering carbon and all that, and it makes you smile, go with it. My traditional compost heap and bark and leaf mulch provide all my healthy soil needs, without a lot of fuss.

Felder Rushing is a Mississippi author, columnist, and host of the “Gestalt Gardener” on MPB Think Radio. Email gardening questions to rushingfelder@yahoo.com.