Six years ago, he was telling me, the field had been blue clay. All he did was add different rocks, ground to the texture of coarse sand, plus an almost insignificant amount of compost. Mineralizing the soil, he called it.

Over the six years, he added total of about two wheelbarrows of the ground rock mixture, and maybe four wheelbarrows of compost. The little field, about 70 square metres in size,  is at a farm near Madoc, on Highway 7, directly north of Belleville.

I’ve had a tractor stuck in blue clay. Walking across it in spring, I’ve become so mired I’ve had to step out of my rubber boots, and pull them out by hand. In the summer, when it has dried, you need a pickax and a hefty swing to break the ground.

And yet here was Reed telling me that sprinkling a little crushed rock, and adding a touch of compost, will transform it into light, airy, fertile soil?

Reed’s company, Cairn Tech, sells mixtures of crushed rock to ``enhance’’ soils. The business grosses $250,000 a year, he says. The Madoc farm is where he maintains stockpiles of crushed rock.

He won’t disclose his mixture recipes. But he will say they contain up to 30 different rock types, and include varying portions of magnesium, sodium, calcium, iron, potassium, manganese, boron, sulphur, silica, trace minerals, other minerals, humic acids, and B-vitamins.

Blue clay is high in magnesium and aluminum, and it also contains sodium, calcium, and potassium. But these minerals are so tightly bound together in chains of large units (polymers) that they are unavailable to plants. And there are precious few microorganisms in the clay that can eat away the polymer bonds.

The soil in the garlic field was the work of bacteria and other microorganisms -- there’s no doubt of that. Only microorganisms could chew through the polymer bonds to liberate the clay minerals and aerate the soil. Only they could manufacture organic acids that would render minerals soluble to plants, and create humus that would retain moisture and fluff up the soil.

Reed claims that a host of microorganisms came from the crushed rock, where they had been suspended. I think they came from the compost that was added, and then multiplied. But no matter who’s right, there’s no denying the soil is now incredibly nutritious.

It’s no secret that the more complete the mineral content of the soil, the more robust will be the plants, the more resistance there will be to insects and pests, the  tastier will be the food grown, and the more abundant will be the crops.

After visiting Reed at Madoc, I stopped at the farm of Roy, Eleanor, and Paul Bousfield near Milton, which borders Highway 401 just west of Toronto. They’ve been using Reed’s minerals for eight years. They grow apples primarily, but also market vegetables and grapes.

It’s been 18 years since the Bousfields stopped using muriatic potash, a naturally occurring compound of potassium and chlorine, to provide potassium to their soils, and Roy’s still angry. He says he spread it on the advice of Ontario Ministry of Agriculture officials. The chlorine killed worms, bacteria, and other organisms in the soil, lowered the sweetness of his produce, and reduced his crop, Roy says.

He hands me a carrot. ``Now try this,’’ he says, and I do. It may be the sweetest carrot I’ve ever tasted. He shows me how they measure sweetness on a hand held refractomer. It reads 11.5 brix. Normally carrots measure around 4.5 to 5 brix, his son Paul says.

``It’s the minerals. We’ve got our apples up to 13 to 15 brix and we’re heading for 18 to 20.’’ The bonus, the Bousfields say, is they can cut out pesticides because most insects avoid apples above 12 brix.

I was so impressed that last weekend we added one of Reeds mineral mixtures to our own vegetable garden.