Finally taking a good look around the garden for the first time this spring, I found a young sweetgum tree I planted two years ago totally flattened on the ground. It's planted on a slope; maybe our winter snows and spring rains washed out the soil on the downhill side. But it had buds popping out, and it seemed to be still at least tenuously attached to its roots, so whatever the cause of its supine state, I figured it could still be saved.
It needed to have a flatter soil surface around its roots; I carved a flat space out of the slope surrounding the trunk, placed a few rocks on the downslope side, and then... well, that's when I went out and bought this:
The tree is propped up, and has even survived one pretty heavy rainstorm since then, so I hope it has a long life ahead of it. But I got to wondering:
With all the topsoil that gets sold for use in our gardens, are we in danger of running out? Where, really, does topsoil come from? I was sure no real topsoil could be "harvested" anywhere within 50 miles of here, it's too developed; and sure enough this bag is identified as coming from West Virginia. How much topsoil can we use up before every square inch of land is denuded of its fertile top layer?
This is a resource that's renewable, to be sure, but not inexhaustible. A thin layer of topsoil in many areas can take years to create - according to Wikipedia, an inch takes 100 years, so that's far, far slower than the rate at which we're using it up. Moreover, gardeners aren't the biggest problem; it's estimated that 25 billion tons of topsoil are lost every year around the world, through erosion, some of it unavoidable, but much of it due to bad agricultural practices.
So, I've decided that topsoil is another of those things we all could work harder to conserve. For example, I don't use it as I've seen it used far and wide -- just to sprinkle on a lawn to enrich the soil. If you've got a lawn (I've got a small one of about 1,000 square feet), consider what experts recommend: don't collect your clippings, just let them lie. And, for enriching soil, composting is a great tool, too, so I also compost - all of last fall's leaves are already decomposed down to a layer only an inch or two thick in the bin you see below but a loose pile will do as well.