Smoke Overhead, Carbon Underfoot

Smoke Overhead, Carbon Underfoot

If you've looked up this week, you've seen it. The sky over Hamilton has been hazy and wrong, the sun a dull orange coin behind it. But before I say anything about our gardens, I want to be clear about whose sky is actually on fire.

That smoke is drifting down from hundreds of wildfires burning across northwestern Ontario, and those fires are burning on First Nations territories. As I write this in mid-July, communities including Collins, Whitesand, Gull Bay, Lac La Croix and Lac des Mille Lacs First Nations are under evacuation orders. In one community, people fled by boat with fire in the trees next to their homes. Families have been flown south only to find there is nowhere to put them, with evacuees sleeping in their cars in Thunder Bay because the hotels are full. These are people losing homes, and land, and the places their families have lived on since long before there was a Hamilton to garden in.

I don't want to move past that quickly, because it's the whole reason the rest of this post exists. We grow on Indigenous land here too. If you have room to do one thing this week, let it be helping the people actually inside this emergency. I've put a few trustworthy ways to do that at the bottom of this post.

Photo shared by NDP MPP Robin Lennox, July 16, 2026.

The helpless feeling, and what to do with it

For most of us here, the fire is far away and the smoke is right here, and that gap produces a specific kind of helplessness. Something enormous is happening, we can't touch it, and we just want to do something. Anything.

I've come to think that feeling is worth listening to rather than shooing away. So here is something small, close to home, and real. It won't clear the smoke or rebuild a single home. But it points the same direction as everything above, and sometimes the small thing we can reach is what keeps us willing to reach for the bigger ones.

Where carbon lives when it isn't in the air

Here's what the haze is quietly showing us: all that smoke is carbon on the move. It was locked up in northern forests, in wood and leaves and soil, and now a great deal of it is in the air.

The hopeful flip side is that carbon has somewhere else it would rather be, which is the ground. The soil under our feet holds more carbon than all the world's plants and the whole atmosphere put together. Your garden bed is a tiny piece of one of the biggest carbon stores on the planet, and plants are how carbon gets down there: a plant pulls carbon dioxide from the air, builds itself with it, and sends a good share down through its roots into the soil, where soil life tucks it away.

Why digging lets it back out

When we turn soil over, with a rototiller or one enthusiastic afternoon with a shovel, we crack open all that stored carbon and expose it to air. Soil microbes wake up, feast on the organic matter, and breathe it back out as carbon dioxide. Digging also tears apart the fungal threads and crumb structure that were physically holding carbon in place. So a freshly turned bed isn't really a fresh start. It's a small exhale of carbon we'd rather have kept in the ground.

Which is why I'm firmly team no-till. Skip the tiller. If soil genuinely needs loosening, a gentle wiggle with a garden fork does the job without turning the whole world upside down.

What no-till actually looks like

The good news is that no-till is less work, not more. You're essentially being asked to leave the shovel in the shed.

  • Build up, don't dig down. Starting a new bed? Lay cardboard over the grass, pile compost on top, and plant straight into it. No stripping sod, no double-digging.
  • Feed from the surface. Add an inch or so of compost or other organic amendments on top each year and let the worms carry it down. They're better at it than we are.
  • Keep living roots in the ground. Bare soil sheds carbon; roots hold onto it. Lean toward perennials and try not to leave beds empty.
  • Keep it covered. A layer of mulch or a living groundcover protects the surface and everything working away beneath it.

A few other small things, if you want them

Not everyone has a bed to build this week, and that's completely fine. Other quiet, real ways to keep carbon where it belongs:

  • Buy from growers who treat their soil well. Local farms practising no-till or regenerative growing are keeping carbon locked in their fields at a scale no backyard can touch. Ask about it at the market. Choosing to support that work is its own small act.
  • Plant something with roots that stay. A shrub, a native grass, a perennial. Woody plants store carbon in their wood for years, and deep-rooted grasses send it well down into the soil. One shrub won't cool the planet, but it's a living piece of the solution that keeps doing its quiet work long after this week's smoke has cleared.

The honest part

I won't pretend that no-till gardening, or one new shrub, or a good farm at the market changes the atmosphere. It doesn't. The scale is all wrong, and I'd rather be honest with you than hand you a feeling.

But here's what I've noticed over years of weeks like this one. These small movements might not change the sky. What they change is us. Reaching for the fork instead of the tiller, putting a shrub in the ground, paying attention to where carbon goes: those things shift something in the person who does them. And people who feel a little less helpless, a little more rooted to the ground they're standing on, tend to be the ones who go on to send bigger changes rippling out through a street, a neighbourhood, a whole city. That's where the real work lives, in what we do next.

So if this week has you wanting to do something, start with the people carrying the worst of it, and then, if it helps, go put your hands in the ground. Both are real. Both are yours.

Ways to help communities affected by the fires

If you're able to give, monetary donations to trusted, Indigenous-led and established organizations do the most good right now. Please don't drop off physical goods unless a specific community has asked for them, since unsorted donations often can't be handled.

A few gardening things worth a look

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