I knew my world was going to hell when I had to use “gift” as a verb. Unironically. And cease all use of the archaic verb form “give”, or risk sounding like a geezer.
Gift-the-verb apparently comes naturally to twenty-somethings. And I can can grit my teeth and do that in writing. But it still grates if I have to speak it.
Try these on:
“I gift you this gift, in the spirit of holiday gift-gifting.”
“It’s the gift that keeps on gifting.”
If my inability to utter such abominations doesn’t do enough to mark me as old, I can recall a time when I did not have to read the fine print on a bag of dirt. (The reading glasses I now need to do that are just so much salt, or perhaps dirt, in the wound.)
Which brings me to the subject of today’s rant: Dirt. Yes, dirt. Because, these days, you don’t know what your bag o’ dirt contains, unless you read the list of ingredients.
Here’s the issue. I thought that “soil”, as used in the garden, had a well-defined and universally-recognized meaning: Dirt. Soil means dirt. Or, at least, soil contains dirt, along with and other stuff. But, first and foremost, finely weathered rock. Inorganic material.
This matters, because dirt is forever. Or, at least, dirt doesn’t rot. Dirt is the mineral, inorganic component of soil. Fill a raised bed with dirt, and you’re done. Next year, the dirt will still be there. Year after. And so on.
As I reconfigured my raised beds this year, I realized I needed a bit more dirt. So I went to Home Depot and bought some bags of topsoil. Because soil — dirt — is what I need to fill those beds. And topsoil is nicer than, say, fill dirt.
Turns out, the idea that “top soil” is mostly “dirt” is not even remotely true. Worse, everybody in the hardware industry now appears to accept that as normal. Unironically.
Long and the short of it is that I purchased a dozen cubic-foot bags of mulch, at my local Home Depot. Only, the bags didn’t say mulch. They said “top soil”. Like so:
Source: Home Depot. Circles in red are mine. Image at top of page has been altered for humorous effect.
But it’s just mulch. It’s 100% organic material. It’s very nice-looking mulch. But there’s zero dirt there. Everything in the bag will rot away. As I found out only after opening a bag, and then reading the fine print on the back.
In my defense, note that they tell me to use this to fill holes in my yard! Use it to level up raised beds!
So I guess my problem is that I could not conceive of being a big enough moron to fill in a hole in my lawn, with mulch. Organic mulch rots. It’s not a permanent fix. Where this manufacturer is located, do they patch potholes in the road with mulch? Do they fix cracked sidewalks with mulch? Then the same logic applies to fixing a hole in your lawn.
Long story short, the manufacturer both labeled the bag as soil, and told me to use it for filling holes. Crazily enough, I assumed it was dirt. Or, at least, mostly dirt. Maybe I’d settle for “contained some dirt”.
But nope. Not a spec of dirt to be found. It’s well-rotted wood compost.
Worse, all the topsoils in this store, and its nearest competitor (Lowe’s), appear to be the same. They are just mulch. Even the “garden soils” and “raised bed soils” appear to be 100% rotted organic matter. Judging by the website, I can’t actually buy dirt from the garden center of my local Home Depot or Lowe’s.
Maybe I never could. When I filled these beds originally, I had the dirt trucked in, in bulk. It’s starting to look like the only way I can buy actual dirt is to have it trucked in again.
When I set about redoing these beds, the last thing I worried about was finding the dirt to fill them. Turns out, that’s probably going to be the most difficult piece of it.
