During tutoring, students never ask about this.  One wonders why not.  The tutor opens a topic that has long intrigued him.

Though I live on the west coast (sunny, 8°C presently), I grew up in Atlantic Canada. Little surprise, then, that many of my childhood years were spent in agricultural settings.  I was never a farmer myself, but lots of my schoolmates were.

When you grow up around something, you learn about it spontaneously.  What a kid learns does not comprise words or proofs; kids develop instincts and connections. Today, I maintain a key interest in the growing season, the plants found in the neighborhood, and the soil.

In my present neighborhood, the soil is fill from the construction process; not for decades has my shovel touched “native” soil.  In the Maritimes, the situation was much different.  In the Annapolis Valley, our backyard garden was the sandy soil prevalent on the hill where we lived.  In PEI, we didn’t have a garden, but the “red dirt” was everywhere.  People not from PEI would always comment on how red the mud was.

I was lead to appraise soil for its agricultural potential.  Soil could be acidic or alkaline, but acidity was much more common.  On our hill in the Valley, as well as where we lived in PEI, there were barely any rocks; in contrast, Newfoundland and the West Coast could be very rocky.

Recently I decided to study more seriously the technical details about the soils in Canada. Immediately I was guided to soilsofcanada.ca, a site out of Saskatchewan. It’s the obvious province to host such a site, with its location near the middle of the country, as well as its connection to agriculture.

While I’ve got a lot of homework to do, I thought I’d share some of my preliminary findings:

According to soilsofcanada.ca, I’ve always lived in a podzolic soil region. The podzols mainly cover Vancouver Island as well as the Atlantic Provinces. They develop from sand sitting on igneous rock, generally in areas where precipitation is above 700mm annually. They tend to be acidic, being from igneous rock.

I’ll be sharing more about soils in Canada in future posts. Cheers:)

Jack of Oracle Tutoring by Jack and Diane, Campbell River, BC.