The air is clean here and I find myself standing outside, breathing in lungfuls of it the way a thirsty person drinks water. When the wind comes up, it's not filled with dust but rather the smell of the sea, and I indulge in healthy lungfuls of that as well. I have noticed there is not nearly as much dust as where I used to live, and what dust does settle on the furniture is softer, more like lint particles and less like dirt particulates.
The actual dirt or soil, on the other hand, is much poorer than where we came from. It's rocky. We live on a hilltop, and you can tell the builders literally scraped a flat spot on the hill in order to build this house and yard. The dirt at the bottom of the hill, which is still our property, is much better. Of course it is. It's filled up with the sediment of all the topsoil that washed down the hill over the last 20 years.
So we're going to have to plant species of plants around the property which don't mind poor soil -- things like grapes and lavender. And the soil in our raised vegetable beds will have to be imported from someplace else and kept enriched with healthy additions of compost, once our animal operation gets going. This is not the kind of yard where you can go out, plant a broccoli or snap pea and expect it to thrive. It's always a trade off, but I'm thinking that while you can enrich your soil or plant in raised beds, if your air is bad it's hopeless.
So it will be awhile before we start seeing food from this ground we live on. But until then, I'm going to dine on the fresh air, and be thankful for that.
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