On a cold February morning the compost piles steam in the first sun, and the smell of them is the earliest plain promise of spring. Payne's Organic Soil Yard carries that thinking out into Santa Fe yards — lawns cared for from the soil upward, mowed at a height that shades their own roots, kept trimmed at the margins, top-dressed, and cleared of the thatch and leaf litter that stops water from ever reaching the ground. In a place that gets this little rain, what a lawn is standing in matters more than what gets put on top of it. Grass grown on good ground in thin air comes in a deeper green and holds that color into the heat, when other yards go pale. The work starts in winter, months before anyone is looking.