What is "humus"

Usage examples of "humus".

Jacob and the females were moving swiftly, their articulated feet padding silently over deep humus and soft green moss, weaving up and down, under and around immense, ancient pillars of old-growth forest with seeming indifference.

The wizard had built a wall of heaving stone before him, and it began to move amidst the flowing shadows, leaning, shifting, pushing humus before it.

Columns of sunlight tunneled through the smoke inside the woods, and the air smelled of cordite, horse manure, trees set on fire from fused shells, and humus cratered out of the forest floor.

He splashed across the stream and went deep into the hardwoods, where round boulders protruded from the humus like the tops of toadstools.

They hauled black dirt from the cane fields and mixed it in the wagon with sheep manure and humus from the swamp, then filled the beds with it and planted roses, hibiscus, azalea bushes, windmill palms, hydrangeas and banana trees all around the house.

He watched the convicts lay split logs in the saw grass and humus and the black mud that oozed over their ankles.

He was pointing at a heap of fresh dirt, the dark humus formed by centuries of fallen leaves and pine needles rotting every summer.

The humus seemed to have been dug from a hole under a sloping formation of broken sandstone.

A shovel, with damp-looking humus still on its blade, leaned against the stone.

Just push that humus over it, and topple that sandstone slab over that, scatter a few handfuls of dead leaves and trash around.

Such are sandy soils that have been much worn by cropping, and also stiff clays in which the humus has become practically exhausted.

It has been the experience in many instances that when the humus soils of the prairie, porous and spongy in character, were first tilled, clover grew on them so shyly that it was difficult to get a good stand of the same until it had been sown for several seasons successively or at intervals.

Since, through the medium of its roots, it stores the ground with humus, such crops should come after it as feed generously on humus, as, for instance, corn and potatoes.

It would fully supply the needs of the crops alternating with it in the line of humus, and also in that of nitrogen.

On timber soils newly cleaned the early sowing would be quite safe where the young plants are not liable to be killed after germination, because of the abundance of humus in them.