Black Magic?

The last bulbs are planted in the Sunshine Coast garden where we have way too many deer to fool with growing tulips, deer's favorite spring lunch. Instead, this garden specializes in daffodils which deer, miraculously, don’t eat. I’m sure the deer are evolving the ability to digest them as I type, but for the moment and for the next year, the bulbs are safe, at least from the deer.

We bought a truck load of dirt from the local nursery yesterday because Ed rebuilt a retaining wall and extended it beyond its prior boundary, leaving great, gaping, 2-foot-deep holes behind it at either end. Once it was all nicely filled in with this black, organic looking dirt, that bed looked like the perfect place to plant the last dozen King Alfred bulbs. But when I dug up the first few trowels-ful of dirt, I noticed there was a strange dust rising from the hole. I took off my gloves and put my hand into this misty apparition and discovered that it was steam. Putting my hand into the hole I had dug, I found it was decidedly hot down there. Whatever is in this organic looking black dirt is still composting at a very active level. Putting the bulbs in there would, I expect, have either cooked them, rotted them out, or caused them to go into high speed growing.

As I have previously explained, I’m not a fan of buying dirt insofar as I already own 2 acres of land, but in this case the argument was that all the other dirt was currently being used to support some other plant life. I read an article last year about the introduction of highly treated sewage as garden soil and maybe this is some of that; the official name was 'treated sewage sludge' but has now been changed (unsurprisingly) to ‘biosolids.' This 'dirt' is certainly a color I had never previously seen in nature or in a commercial planting mix: it is really black rather than a rich brown, which would be my expectation. (It is the black area behind the midlevel gray wall in the picture above; you can see it better if you click on the picture.) And it has a truly strange smell; and not a pleasant one either. I trust that will dissipate as whatever is in it finishes burning up. It does seem one more interference with my understood way of life. Dirt is not supposed to steam, at least not if you don’t live in Yellowstone Park.

What’s going on here? I could ask the clerk at the nursery, but I doubt seriously that she would offer me clear information. I have read around a bit on the net about biosolids, enough to know that they are being used extensively and that there is at least some dispute about their safety. (In the realm of they are safe if they are produced properly; we could mention that to the Chinese, I suppose. Something like ‘eggs are safe if produced properly; if not, if you give the chickens feed with melamine in it, well then all bets are off.’) However, Cornell University provides some general information as well as a description of the issues with respect to one of the commercially available biosolids, ‘Milorganite,’ which seems generally applicable to the biosolids available to home gardeners.

I expect I’d be more concerned if that was an area where I planted a vegetable garden, but it’s not: nothing but flowers. I could hope that this black magic, this black something, may be just one more way to discourage the deer from lunching in those borders, I suppose. And for now, those 12 daff bulbs had to go somewhere else.

Update: I took the temperature of that black dirt this morning after a day and night of rain and temperatures in the high 50's: at 6 inches deep, 117 degrees F.