Teaming With Microbes

We now know that we can team with microbes in our soil to provide a growing medium for all plants that is superior to petrochemicals in disease resistance, drought tolerance, water requirements, productivity, yield, plant nutrition levels and insect repellency.  And this is a only short list of  benefits!  We do this by cultivating large numbers and diversity of microbes that are the basis of the breakdown of organic residues into usable plant nutrients.  In our last newsletter, we mentioned and recommended Teaming with Microbes, A Gardener’s Guide to the Soil Food Web by Jeff Lownfels and Wayne Lewis as an excellent source for information on the Soil Food Web and how we can use it to our benefit.  Another excellent source for a quick primer of what we are talking about can be found here.

In the above mentioned book, the authors came up with 19 Soil Food Web Gardening rules.  We list the first 5 in this newsletter.  When the word compost is used, you can substitute our Earthworm Castings, because they are a superior compost/castings product:

1. Some plants prefer soils dominated by fungi; others prefer soils dominated by bacteria.
2. Most vegetables, annuals, and grasses prefer their nitrogen in nitrate form and do best in bacterially dominated soils.
3. Most trees, shrubs, and perennials prefer their nitrogen in ammonium form and do best in fungally dominated soils.
4. Compost can be use to inoculate beneficial microbes and life into soils around your yard [and garden] and introduce, maintain, or alter the soil food web in a particular area.
5. Adding compost and its soil food web to the surface of the soil will inoculate the soil with the same food web.

By employing these simple guidelines (and more that will be presented in future newsletters) you can join with the microbe team which is ready and willing to create an ecosystem in your soil which will provide an extraordinary growth medium for anything you want to grow.  This team has been playing together for millions of years (they have their playbook down!) cycling dead plants into reusable material.  One only has to glean the obvious unobvious of a giant sequoia growing in a small canyon in California surrounded by arid land.  It was a living soil that fertilized and fed that magnificent being!  There was no need for petrochemical fertilizer for that tree to reach its gigantean size.  As a matter of fact, it is doubtful that our current chemicals could ever do this.  These guidelines allow you to set up your own “factory” of nutrient cycling in your yard and garden to achieve similar spectacular results in a child, pet, wildlife and earth friendly manner.

Used with Permission from Yelm Worm Farm.

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