When a ball of earth formed in our palm crumbles readily at a touch, it is time to plant peas. For okra, it should be warm enough to walk in barefoot. My own garden is here in the Granite State, where the growing season is short, the soil shallow and the boulders huge. Yet these same rocks, these monolithic outcroppings, are the soil's ancestors. Reduced by heat, cold, wind, rain and glacial ice, they have spawned not only the sandy loam of my plot, but by descent the limestone, sandstone and shale, the soils that result from them, as well as all the salts and sediments of the sea.
Soil science is too dignified to be sexy.
Let us forget that soils have been surveyed and classified, mapped and analyzed, and concentrate on the simple truth that there is soil in our blood. You are and I am, whether we stop to wash our hands and faces before we sit down at the table. No matter how carefully we rinse our lettuce or scrub our potatoes, we end up eating a mineral fraction. We can pick every last pebble of mud out of the dried beans, and split every leek right down to its base, but we will never rid our diet of its essential dirt. A baker's dozen minerals from boron to zinc are essential to the growth of plants.