Poor Man's Fertilizer

      Looking back, I realize I took no photographs to document last week's snowstorm. Was it that I couldn't bear to dignify such a setback by recording its existence? Was I tired of snow? Or was I just not all that surprised?
     I like to tell myself it was mostly the latter. The snow arrived overnight at the end of the first week of April, and we woke to a world whiter than it has been all winter, with more snow on the way and enough being blown sideways off the trees that from time to time the cleared patch of infant First Flower Farm wasn't even visible from the house. The daffodils had their faces to the snow, and it was with mixed feelings that I saw the neighbors erecting an enormous snowman in our side yard. (His "feet" are still there.) You probably know what snow looks like, anyway, without visual aids: white as the page beneath this blog as I craft it. In the days that followed that snowstorm, there was little opportunity—or desire—for outdoor work, and I've been using the time to apply to farm markets, buy insurance, plant seeds and rethink my marketing scheme.
     Snow in April does not stay, and it would be whining to complain about weather this month, no matter how cold and gloomy it might be. Especially after a snowless winter, the week of white, which has renewed itself a couple of times since that first round, is easy to accept as nothing more than an interruption. I don't have a reservoir or even a well; First Flower Farm is on the town water system. Even so, a spring rain or snow always seems like a sort of insurance against later drought even if I, personally, can't bank any of it underground. Old time farmers had an even more optimistic way of looking at the snows of springtime than this. Snow in March was "sugar snow," because it sustained the period of cold nights/warm days that prolonged the rise of sap in the maple trees. April snow was "poor man's fertilizer." Farmers went so far as to plow it into the soil  rather than letting it simply melt in.  They viewed it as a valuable commodity which would ensure a strong, healthy crop later on.
    I didn't bother tilling in my "fertilizer." Especially on my clay-based soil, I know whatever good it might do by incorporating it would be undone by walking on the wet ground and compacting it into footprint-shaped bricks. Whenever there is just such a spring snowfall, however, I think about the idea of "poor man's fertilizer" and wonder how the idea came to be. Sure, there is a lot of false science in agriculture. Maybe the term was nothing more than a way to deal with the frustration of uncooperative weather. Maybe plowing in the white stuff was an excuse to get outside and do something. (Maybe it was so named by a farm wife who was in the midst of spring cleaning and didn't want a bored husband underfoot.) Then again, that's a lot of labor to devote to something that doesn't at least seem effective.
     It's certainly true that irrigating does not make plants thrive the way a good rain does. Rain is more than water, even if that irrigation comes from a natural source, without the chlorine and other additives of a municipal supply. Back when I had "free" well water to run sprinklers, I often saw that no good soaking by hose ever made the plants grow the way a summer shower did. Was it the increased general humidity? Barometric pressure changes? This experience makes me wonder if snow, likewise, offers something that rain does not; a "something" those old-timers recognized, even if they couldn't explain its reason.
     Snow does consist of more than frozen water. It starts from a seed of dust or other particulate; it brings with it whatever airborne substances it encounters in the snow cloud or on the way to the ground, including bits of dust storms from across the continent and smoke from stacks across the globe. Snow has been known to fall colored now and then from algae already living in it; the same thing that attracts the tiny black springtail insects my grandfather called "snow fleas." They're finding nourishment in what our naked and biased eye sees only as inert white stuff.
    The more the complexity of the soil biome is studied, the more we have come to understand that "good soil" isn't simply a question of minerals providing chemical balance. A fertile soil is a living soil. It involves a complex interaction among microscopic organisms. Is that snow bringing in just such mcroorganisms? Does it contain trace elements the plants crave? Is the make-up of this snowfall working transformations I can't even see? Quite possibly. Meantime, this week I'm in here, stoking the fire and reconsidering my first seed order. Whether it is good for this year's crops-to-be or not, that Poor Man's Fertilizer is certainly nourishing my ambitions. Bloom...