When it all comes down to it, life is just a series of small steps on the way to somewhere else. It’s never as simple as, say, telling someone you’ve bought a house. What you’ve really done is saved up the money for it, decided what you want, scouted properties, negotiated the deal, signed a thousand pieces of paper, taken the keys, packed and unpacked, sorted things over, and then started the things you want to do. But it’s much easier to say “I bought a house.”

In the same way, it’s easier to say you’re improving the soil on the property. What has actually happened is that you’ve looked over the soil, discovered that fill dirt and sand from other lots was dumped on yours, dug down a foot or so in various places looking for the real soil you know is there, tested the soil, brought in a ton of topsoil and compost, and sweated your way into what is the beginning of returning the top layers of nothing to a form that is rich and loamy and beautiful for growing Stuff.

There are easier ways to do this, to be sure. Hire someone with a tractor and tiller and have them till up the whole thing. Bring in a few dump trucks of topsoil, dump it in, then have someone with a tractor grade it a bit. Buy a bunch of pallets of sod and have someone lay it – or just skip all the rest and do this step instead.

But if you’re interested in the more organic process – and I mean organic in all senses of the word, including investing part of yourself in it – then you might take the giant picture and break it into smaller steps, experimenting to see what might work well on a larger scale. You might, for instance, take a 300 square foot area, level it a bit by hand, rake out all the glass and stones and sticks and weeds and finishing nails and all the other junk that is a byproduct of a construction site, and water it down a little to keep the dust from flying everywhere. You might get something like this.

You might have ordered a pound each of buckwheat, yellow clover, soybeans, and oats to see what will germinate in this thin, sandy ground, grow to a decent size, and then be suitable for plowing right back into the earth. Green manure, helping the soil as it grows and then again as it decomposes. With some watering, after a couple of weeks you might find this.

You might judge that in a couple of weeks, everything that has popped up in this area will be quite suitable for plowing under and that reseeding the area will be a fine idea indeed.

You might.