- Teaming with Microbes by YourEnchantedGardener
16 y
1,776 2 Messages Shown
Blog: Plant Your Dream!
I want a copy of this book.
Shannon Foley, of Soil Secrets,
lent her copy to me.
BOOK REVIEW HERE:
http://www.coldclimategardening.com/2007/01/27/teaming-with-microbes-book-rev...
Published by Timber Press.
I really like this publisher.
Spent time with them at the BEA last Spring
in LA.
Teaming with Microbes: Book Review
January 27th, 2007 by Kathy Purdy · 6 Comments
FROM THE BOOK REVIEW:
It probably would have taken me a lot longer to get around to reading Teaming with Microbes: A Gardener’s Guide to the Soil Food Web if Carol hadn’t suggested it for the Garden Blogger’s Book Club. Partly because I would normally wait until my library got a copy, instead of buying it brand new. Partly because my attitude was, “I already know we need microbes in the soil. Duh, that’s what compost is for.” Ah, but little did I know how little I knew.
Fine tune the pH of your compost? Who knew? Paramecia and amoebas, those one-celled creatures you study in high school biology, part of the soil food web? Who knew? Speaking of high school biology, I remember learning about the nitrogen cycle, and just as these authors state (p. 48), it was taught as a chemical process. I remember hearing about nitrogen-fixing bacteria, but the rest of it was all chemicals. If anyone knew that biological processes were involved every step of the way, they sure weren’t writing high school textbooks. That’s when the light bulb went on for me: thanks to the electron microscope, among other things, organic gardeners now know why compost works, and not just that it does work.
And what’s been learned will (or should) change what you do in the garden. But are you ready for this:
Rototilling and and excessive soil disturbance destroy or severely damage the soil food web. They are outmoded practices and should be abandoned in established garden beds.
For the record, we don’t own a rototiller. And I’m not into double digging on a regular basis. But I hate, I really hate edging my bed with a spade, or digging a hole for a new perennial, and hitting a knee-busting, shoulder-jangling rock. So whenever I start a new bed, or edge an established one, I remove rocks when I find them, even if it means digging a lot deeper or wider than I originally intended. I’m not talking about pebbles, mind you. I’m talking about stones as big as my open hand, and bigger.
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YourEnchantedGardener
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- Re: Teaming with Microbes by fledgling
16 y
987
"Rototilling and and excessive soil disturbance destroy or severely damage the soil food web. They are outmoded practices and should be abandoned in established garden beds."
Thank goodness others are noticing, too!
I once tried to landscape/garden on an old mountainside property.
Rocks continued to come up that I called 'loaves of bread', according to their size.
The other size I had no name for...they were 3, 4, and 5 feet through...showing only as small mounds at first, maybe as much as a foot across.
I dug down.
The first one I had split by professionals. The chips and chunks from that were enough to build a stone wall, rockeries, and the rest we threw over the fence into the wild bush beside us.
Later, some Italian fellows knocked on my door and asked if it would be okay to take those pieces...they were 'green granite' and very useful for fireplaces, etc.
I figure they wouldn't have bothered to ask me unless the rock was valuable.
Before throwing those pieces into the bush I used them to raise another biggie.
This one was completely buried where I hoped to garden.
As I kept exposing it I began to see its dimensions.
I was doing the yard by myself, and I now had enough experience to figure how to raise this baby...alone.
...Leverage.
I went into the bush and pulled down two or three saplings that were leaning anyway. I think they were vine maples.
There was a four-foot length of 8 X 8 left from the barn that had once stood on the property.
When I had dug under the rock I wanted to raise, I circled it with chips and chunks of the broken rock, all leaning against the big one I was working on.
I put the 8 X 8 beside the hole and poked the saplings under the biggie. Then I pulled and sat on the saplings until the big one shifted and rolled enough for the chips and chunks to fall beneath it.
:D
Over a few days I kept repeating the above....circle with chips and chunks...and shift the biggie with sapling levers over the 8 X 8. Up she came.
Then I turned the whole thing over to dh and his friends. They rolled the big one into the bush...maybe using the leverage of the saplings.
The hard part was getting him to hold off on building the fence until I got the big rock out. He didn't think I could do it.
I was a real smart ass in those days.
I took out a huge cedar stump, eight feet high, with a garden hose, too. Good job there was lots of slope from removing boulders...so the water and soil could flow away. Cedar tree roots tangle in a ball, including lots of rocks, loaves of bread. I washed them out with water and picked them out one at a time.
I learned the relationship between rocks and roots.
Yes, we like lovely tilth to our growing soil, so our carrots and parsnips will be nice and straight. But all manner of veggies grow right around whatever stones happen to be there.
All the nutrients for plants come from rock and sand in the soil, anyway...through the services of micro organisms, in water and sun, over time.
Still, it was many years before I realized the importance of protecting the micro organisms from the ravages of exposure to the elements.
The soil I dug in that garden was loaded with nutrients from years of natural accumulation...and by virtue of the fact that the land on the other side of the fence was as nature had built it over hundreds of years.
(Though there were four-foot wide stumps in there from trees that had been logged fifty or a hundred years ago. One still showed a number carved into it...434 I think it was.)
When I dug, the micro organisms and insects had somewhere to run...and then come back as weeds and grasses, and veggies, covered the scar in the earth I had made.
Nature goes for balance.
We don't realize what balance consists of...especially when 'business' tells us to use machines and chemicals.
Even 'manure' can only contain what the animals were fed and inocculated with. If the animals were raised on plants grown on micro organism deficient soil, what is their poop worth?
PLUS, plants are very selective about what they take up, thank goodness! They only take the minerals they need, in the exact amounts they need...if those are available...if the micro organisms are present.
The building blocks of life depend on tiny critters we can't see.
Plants will even create new substances from what IS available, in order to survive. The plant will LOOK the same, look healthy, when really it is stressed and cannot give the nutrients we hope for.
Mess with the soil micro organisms and we shoot ourselves in the foot.
This was talked about in the 1930's...how our veggies and grains can't give us the nutrients we require because 'the soil is depleted'.
Then I read some of the work of a Japanese man who decided not to plow. ('Plough' to Brits.)
What the Japanese fellow decided to do was to scatter the seeds of a vigorous food plant on his undug fields, and let nature take its course.
More than that, he scattered TWO varieties of seeds...ones that grew and ripened at different times.
The early variety grew and was harvested before the later variety needed the room for its cycle.
...All with the aid of undisturbed micro organisms and insects...on land watered by the elements...and tended by hand.
It takes a pile of experience to know which plants and varieties will behave this way on any field you have access to.
Google 'no-till' to find the books this man wrote.
And, please pass this post on to anyone interested. I've written my best understandings here.
Thank you for learning and writing. You give me hope for all of us...particularly my grandbabies.
Fledgling
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fledgling
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