We Have Been Doing it Wrong! - Making Healthy Soil is NOW easier than ever.

many gardeners Now understand that gardening is all about making good soil good healthy soil grows better plants many gardeners also understand that the reason soil is healthy is because of the microbes that are in that soil and so we've developed a number of different techniques in the garden to increase the number of microbes and make so healthier and Commercial companies have also got in the act and they now make products they're basically packaged microbes and they suggest that you take these and spread them around your Gardens I mean now the gardeners know the value of

microbes well you might as well go and spend a lot of money and buy them unfortunately most of the stories about spreading microbes in the garden are meths they don't really work but there is some new science about soil that is really important for gardeners to understand and once you understand that you're going to change the way you garden and the good news is it's actually going to get easier not harder before I get into this topic in any detail I'd like to thank Joel Williams he has been a guest speaker in a number of

YouTube channels in the area of Agriculture and I've listened to his work and I think is really good information so I've taken some of that and some of my own information and put it together to present the topic we're going to talk about today as many of you know microbes are the key to healthy soil they convert large organic matter particles and convert those into smaller and smaller molecules and thereby release the nutrients that plants need they also create the aggregation that's that nice crumbly stuff that all gardeners want in their soil they help plants

fend off pathogens and they dissolve minerals and convert those minerals into a form that plants can actually use all right so microbes are good for gardens and if some microbes are good well more have to be better right and in fact that's true the more microbes you have in soil the healthier that soil so the job of a gardener is simply to have as many microbes in their soil as possible if you do that everything else kind of follows automatically the microbes do their own job and they'll make that soil better they'll create the aggregations

they'll feed the plants all you have to do is have more microbes well how do you do that now that gardeners understand this there are all kinds of techniques that are proposed for increasing the microbes in your soil and lots of people are recommending things like compost tea and weed te they're even purchasing those microbes now if you put those in your soil surely you have more but in fact that doesn't work if you take a bunch of microbes and add it to your soil within no time at all you'll have just as many microbes

as you had before you added them there's a fundamental concept here that is important to understand microbes are always at capacity microbes replicate very quickly in a lab they can double and number every 20 minutes now now that's not going to happen in your soil but they still replicate very quickly if the conditions change so that there's more food and space and air for microbes they automatically fill that space they automatically grow simply adding more microbes doesn't work because there's not enough food for those new microbes so they simply die off so your job as

a gardener is not to add microbes to your soil your job is to improve the conditions the living condition for those microbes and the thing they need most is food if you add more micro food to your soil the microbes come automatically they just simply grow now there's a number of different ways you can add this food and many people have now come up with various concoctions to do that uh some people spread milk all over their Garden that grows microbes other people use molasses that's a really popular one another one that you probably had

thought about is liquid organic fertilizers so these organic fertiliz izers that are mostly water things like fish Emulsion seaweed extract there's very little carbon in there there's very little substance it's mostly water and a few chemicals floating in the water the problem with these various liquids is that they contain very little food that stays in the soil so for example if I take molasses and I spread it on the soil there are sugars there and microbes love sugar so they start to grow but very quickly those sugars run out and the population crash es they

all start dying off because there's not enough food same thing with milk with weed tea with compost tea and with these liquid fertilizer they're missing the solid component now if you take a look at something like compost that is a lot of solid material there and it's that solid material that takes a long time to decompose and gives a long-term feeding and that's the way we want to feed the microb there are three effective ways to increase the number of microbes in your garden number one is to add solid organic material number two is to

let the plants do it with their exudates and number three is something that almost no gardeners have heard about and it's called necromass we want to do things in the garden to increase the necroa now let's have a look at all three of those methods the first one I'd like to look at is the traditional way of building healthy soil and it's adding organic matter to that soil and this can be things like comp post or manure more specifically I'd like to call this material shot organic matter it comes from the shotes of the plant

shoot organic matter is anything that's started as part of the plant that grows above soil so those are all the leaves all the stems and if you think about it that's the material most gardeners use so if we make compost we're using all those dead plant materials and leaves we might throw in some manure but if you think about it manure is just processed plant material it's again those leaves and stems that have gone through an animal and been partially decomposed and then we put it in our compost pile or we might put the manure

directly into our garden fall leaves again material that comes from the Chute of the plant wood chips is another option again that comes from the chot of the plant so as a group these are the materials that we have been using traditionally to improve the soil and they do work if we have a closer look at compost we have something called finished compost finished compost is not finished we call it that just because it looks finished but if we take finished compost and put that into our soil it continues to decompose for years and I

generally use a round number of about five years that depends a little bit on the climate and on the material and so on but it gives you a rough idea so I put compost on today and the microbes use that as food they start digesting it and eating it and they do that for about 5 years before it runs out so is this good micro food well it does have some benefits for one most gardeners have access to it that's the leftover stuff in your garden number two it does feed microbes and it does last

numerous years so from that point of view it's not a bad option either but it does have a downside a lot of that material is made out of compounds that are very hard for microbes to eat things like lignan and cellulose now microbes can digest that but it takes time and it takes a lot of energy so the microbes have to use up a lot of their stored energy to digest these materials before it's completely decomposed so it's not a very efficient process for them the other thing that happens is that along the way a

lot of CO2 is produced in fact when we take a compost pile it starts out as a 4ft pile and by the time we're finished is about one foot high now part of that is due to the fact that we now have smaller particles so they compact but part of it is due to the fact that we've lost a lot of the carbon that was in there and that carbon gets converted to CO2 and goes into the air so out of that 4ft pile we start with only a small part actually makes it to the

soil and then over the next 5 years the microbes continue digesting it continually releasing more CO2 into the air so when we're finished a very small amount of the carbon is actually sequestered in the soil so this shoot organic matter does work it's a good option for G cuz they have it but it's not really a great food source for micro there is a better option and that's root exod dates we now know that root exudates are much more important for building healthy soil than the shoot organic material and there are two reasons for that

these exodites are simple compounds that are very easy to digest from microbes so the microbes aren't expending a lot of energy to digest the material it's a very efficient process C so more of the carbon remains in the soil we're also finding that the carbon from these exodites is also longer lasting in the soil so it's a better way to sequester carbon so what are root exudates if you think about the plant the leaves above ground are catching sunlight and absorbing CO2 from the air and it's turning that into sugars those sugars and carbohydrates that

are produced that's where all the energy is stored and all living organisms use those compounds for energy so the plant now has all these compounds and we used to think that the plant uses all of that for growing for making leaves for making roots for making fruit but we now know a large part of that is actually excreted from the roots and those excreted chemicals are called exudates now these exudates come out of the roots in an area called the rizosphere it's a small area around the root system I've created a separate video about the

rizosphere and I'll put a link to that at the end of this one now originally we thought that these exudates consisted mostly of sugars and carbohydrates to attract the microbes into the rizosphere but we now know the plant creates all kinds of different chemicals and it puts that into the soil area around the roots to attract the right kind of microbes and each plant attracts a different array of microbes in fact not only that but the plant attracts different microbes depending on its growth stages so as a Seedling it produces one set of exod dates

and that's attracts one group of microbes and then as the plant gets older and it's starting to make fruit it changes the exod dates that are coming out and that attracts a different array of microbes so throughout the life cycle of the plant the number of microbes in the hypom microbes is continually changing what we now know is that some plants almost 50 50% of the compounds they make in the leaves through photosynthesis and excrete those out of the root system that's a huge amount of carbon and that's why exod dates are so important for

building soil gardeners never see these exod dates but there's a huge amount of organic material constantly being excreted by The Roots all right so this is a good thing for soil it's a good thing for the gardener but how does the gardener influence the amount of exudates that are created well that's relatively simple more plants means more roots and more Roots means more exit dates so the job of the gardener is to grow more plants it's really that simple as long as you have a growing plant in the soil its roots are creating exudates and

that's building healthy soil here are some ways a gardener can maximize the use of roots and their exudates keep the soil covered with living plants at all times if you see bare soil that means you haven't maximized the amount of plants grow cover crops and even let the weeds grow a growing weed is better than bare soil whenever possible use perennial plants because they excrete 30 to 50% of their photosynthates as exudates annuals are not quite as good at this they only excrete 20 to 30% of their photosynthates increase the plant diversity each species plant

cultivates a different population of microbes so a diverse population of plants increases the diversity of microbes use intercropping so that one plant follows another through the season to maximize root growth and something that may not be quite as obvious but it's important to keep plants growing healthy give them all the water and fertilizer they need a healthy plant is going to have a larger growth above ground a larger root system below ground and and it's going to excrete more exudates there have been some studies done and these studies show that exudates may be five times

more efficient at creating healthy soil than the shoot organic matter that gardeners have traditionally used that's how valuable these exudates are they're really a much better way to make good soil the exate carbon is sequestered longer in soil and that's good for both the environment and long-term healthy soil the science on this is now fairly clear roots are more important to us than all that organic material above ground that we collect and add to the soil now I'm not saying you should stop collecting that organic matter let's keep adding that as well but roots are

much more important and as gardeners we have to start thinking about the root system and how we maximize the size of the root system that's the quickest way to healthy soil that brings us to the third method for improving our soil negr Mass what is negr mass well it's the dead bodies of things that used to be living and the majority of it in soil is made up of dead microbes it's important to understand that microbes don't live very long and they reproduce very quickly so there's lots of dead microbes around and that material builds

up in soil and we're finding out that this is much more important than we ever thought now there's lots of things that kill off microbes for instance if your soil gets too dry they start dying off if they run out of a food source they die off if you harvest that carrot and pull it out of the ground all the microbes that were around that root they die off because suddenly their carbon source is gone seasonal changes also kill them off gets too cold in the fall microbes die off bottom line is that there's lots

of things that are creating negr mass but you have to have the microbes to start with now why is this so important it turns out that the negr mass is a key component in soil aggregation now you may not have heard of the term aggregation but that's the clumping together of small soil particles into larger particles and when we have good aggregation we have that crumbly soil that we all dream about that crumbly material that has great drainage has lots of air in the soil and air is critical for plant growth and microb growth it

has large pore spaces so that Roots have an easy time of getting through the soil it's also a great place for microbes to hide microbes also have predators and they hide inside the small cices inside an aggregate material as gardeners we want better aggregation and the way that aggregation forms is because of the Dead microbes it's their dead bodies the decomposing dead bodies that stick all this together and create the Aggregates there have been some interesting studies done when they tested the top layer of forest soil what they found was that microbial negr Mass accounted

for 45% of the soil organic matter and this value climbs to 73% in Meadows and 78% in Wetland soil the fungal proportion of this is larger than the bacterial proportion another study found that over 50% of the soil organic carbon in grasslands and crop lands is derived from microbial negr Mass so clearly this material is important for gardeners and we want more of it so how do we get more the amount of negr mass we have is directly proportional to the amount of living microbes we have so we can kind of forget the negr mass

and focus on the microb we want lots of microbes and we get lots of microbes by adding microb food to the soil now that we know this there are some gardening techniques where we should spend more attention to one of those are cover crops now I think many gardeners understand cover crops but we don't really use them very effectively they're used more in agriculture but in the garden I rarely see them mentioned a cover crop is any plant material that you plant it's usually done with seeds when the ground is bare so for instance in

Late July early August you harvest your garlic and then that doesn't get planted again till October so you've got several months there where the ground is bare and most gardeners just leave it empty that's a perfect spot to grow some cover crop anytime the soil is bare you should be growing something now why are cover crops so important first of all they produce growth above ground those leaves and stems and those are valuable even if you use those as a mulch to add value to your garden but now we know that there's something more important

going on here and that's the root system that living root system is creating exod dates and those exod dates are feeding your microbes those living Roots is really why you want to grow cover crop you want something growing every place you can all the time the more Roots you have the more exudates you have the more microbes you have and The more negr mass you have as simple as that so we want to keep things growing and cover crops are great for that there are some other benefits to cover crops that are less obvious what

is that the cover crop is generally a different plant a different species than your main crop and as we now know different plants will produce different acetates and cultivate a different group of microbes so by using cover crops we actually increase the diversity of microbes and that's generally considered a good thing a meta study from 2019 looked at 60 other studies and they found that cover crops increase the amount of microbes by 27% the increased microbial activity by 22% and they increased diversity by 2 1 12% now these effects are dependent on things like climate

the way the cover crop is terminated and the degree of tillage that takes place but it's clear that cover crops increase the microbes in soil and increase the amount of sequestered carbon in soil the other technique that we should revisit is living mulch now living mulge is generally a small low growing plant that grows in amongst other plants so instead of putting down wood chips as your mulch you actually grow something there and generally it's some kind of spreader that grows between all the other plants and covers that soil and it doesn't interfere with your

main plant one of the arguments against living mulch is that it competes with your main plant for things like nutrients and moisture and that's a good argument for not using them and going with something like woodchip mulch but now we know the value of those roots so this living mulch has a huge root system it's producing exat in our soil it's cultivating microbes and it's cultivating microbes that are different than our main plant a living mulch May produce healthier soil than that wood chip mulch that we're using living mulch is a great technique for your

ornamental bats grow them between your prenols and between your shrubs in the vegetable bad we can do something similar there we call it intercropping so you have your main crop grow and then between each of those plants we plant a second crop again we want to maximize the use of the soil and have as many roots in the soil as possible okay now you've learned a whole bunch of new stuff about soil and how things affect the health of your soil how do we apply that in the garden the traditional way of taking plant material

and compost and putting it on top of our soil or even digging it into our soil that still works that's still a valid technique and we shouldn't stop doing that but what we know now is that that's not a very efficient way of improving soil it's a very slow way a much faster way is to focus on growing Roots as gardeners we have to start taking every available space of soil and have something grow there even if it's a weed weed is better than bare soil keep the roots growing here are some specific things you

should start to do use cover crops anytime the soil is bare have a bag of seeds ready to go so you can just goow in the garden and spread some seeds every time you see some bare soil leave weeds unless weeds are causing a real problem you might be better off leaving some of them now you don't want them to go to seed but their roots are actually helping you improve your soil now if you don't want the weeds well pull them out and throw on some seeds for a cover crop one thing I've learned

is that fertilizing and Watering your plants may be more important than I originally thought we want to keep our plants growing really well the better they grow the more photosynthesis they do the more root exid dates they excrete even though you want your plants to grow well be careful about how much nitrogen you use in the garden too much nitrogen will produce a lot of top growth instead of root growth so you want enough nitrogen to have healthy plants but you don't want a lot of excess nitrogen wherever you can use different species of plants

both in your cover crop and in your mixed beds a larger variety of species means more microbial diversity whenever possible intercrop have more than one plant growing in a particular spot as a gardener you can directly influence how well your root systems grow and how how many roots you have growing in your garden the more Roots you grow the faster your soil will improve now if you'd like to learn more about the rizosphere that thin layer of soil around your roots have a look at this video right here and if you're interested in some composting

meths hop on over to this video here happy gardening