CoachSoil is the earth’s living skin: a mixture of mineral grains (ground rock, from sand to clay), organic remains in every stage of decay, water, air — and an enormous population of living things. Its dark upper layer, richest in decayed matter, is the humus layer that gardeners prize.
Examples
Example 42.2 (A handful, censused)
One handful of woodland soil, sorted on a white tray: mineral grains; root threads; half-leaves, leaf skeletons and black crumbs — organic matter on its way down; and the census — an earthworm, two woodlice, a millipede, tiny white springtails, thread-fine fungus felts. And the tray shows only the visible: a single gram of soil holds more living things too small to see than there are people in a great city.
Example 42.5 (The leaf’s last year)
Follow one oak leaf down. November: fallen, whole. Winter: softened, mined by fungi’s threads, nibbled to a lace skeleton by springtails and woodlice. Spring: dragged underground by an earthworm, eaten, and cast out as worm-worked crumbs. Summer: its last fragments are black humus, and its minerals ride the soil’s water — into a root, perhaps the oak’s own. Eaten four times, the leaf has become food for its own tree.
Example 42.7 (Compost, explained at last)
The compost bin of Example 13.9 now reads as an appliance: a decomposer workshop stocked with peelings. Worms, woodlice and the unseen crews dismantle the kitchen’s organic waste to dark humus; the gardener spreads it, and its minerals feed the beds (Remark 22.5). The heap even runs warm — the decomposers’ own burning (Proposition 41.6) heats their workshop.