Best Way to Increase Soil Microbes and Improve Plant Health

are you confused about microbes in your soil should you be adding more to increase that number should you be doing things differently in the garden so you don't harm them and should you care about microbes anyways what's the big deal with them now if you're confused I'm not surprised the internet is full of garbage about microbes you're bombarded with all kinds of incorrect information both on blogs and YouTube channel there's dozens and dozens of videos that show you how to make microbe soups and how to spread them around the garden and they tell you how

wonderful these things are and manufacturers are pushing their products well in this program we're going to have a look at the truth of all this we're going to understand why microbes are important in the soil and why you should care we're going to look at what you can do to take care of your microbes and increase the number and we're going to have a look at a lot of these solutions that are promoted on the internet and finally I'm going into introduce you to a secret that I haven't seen promoted anywhere and it's probably the

easiest and best way to grow microbes in soil let's have a quick look at why microbes in soil are important microbes decompose organic matter and as they do that they release nutrients and your plants need those nutrients so it's really the microbes in soil that are feeding your plants more microbes better growing plants it's a simple equation now let's be clear here I'm talking about growing in the soil outside using real soil I'm not going to discuss potted plants in this program that's a whole different story and their microbes are not that important but outside

they are the second important thing that microbes do is they actually improve your soil that nice black fluffy crumbly soil that you'd like to have in your garden that's made by microbes and by paying attention to the micro population in your garden you will get better soil another simple equation in fact when you think about gardening it's more about growing microbes than growing plants I know you focus on the rose but the real solution is to take care of the microbes in the soil beneath that Rose and the rose Grows All on its own take

care of your microbes and you can grow anything you want in the soil provided you have the right climate and soil condition before I discuss ways of increasing the microbes in in your soil we should look at the ones you already have how many microbes are in your soil I mean I see lots of comments online saying oh I have really poor soil and my microb level is really low how do I increase this the reality is that no matter how crappy your soil is you have a huge amount of microbes this is what we

find in a typical soil sample bacteria are there in numbers like a 100 million to a billion and this is in one gram of soil a gram of soil is equivalent to the weight of a small paper clip or as I like to tell gardeners it's about the amount of soil under your fingernails after an hour of good gardening it's a tiny tiny amount of soil and yet you can have aund million bacteria and that's in soil that's not great how about fungi well fungi are larger so there's less of them but still they range

in the number of a 100,000 to a million algae and cyanobacteria smaller organisms and you get a thousand to a million of those cror are larger and you have a, to 100,000 nematodes up to 5,000 nematodes in that one gram of soil what that means that even if you have crappy soil you've got billions and billions and billions of microbes throughout the soil layer you have lots now if you want a better Garden you want even more but don't let people tell you you don't have enough I hear this all the time about compost piles

too we put all our organic matter in that compost pile and then we have to add an activator an activator is microbes you don't need an activator every piece of material is covered with billions of bacteria and fungi they're ready to decompose that if you want to learn more about composting have a look at my book compost science for gardener all right so microbes are important gardeners want more of them how do we get more well before we look at adding microbes to the soil let's look at what they really need microbes are like you

and I they need three basic things air water and food as a gardener it's your job to give them those three things so let's look at air first what surprises a lot of people is that 25% of soil is actually air that's a large amount and because microbes breathe air just like us they need oxygen and they breathe out CO2 they need lots of air they need that air to be exchanged and refreshed if they're living in a place that doesn't get enough oxygen many of the microbes die off how do we give them more

air there's not much a gardener can do here but one thing you can do is stop compacting your soil anything that compacts soil squeezes the soil particles together squeezes those the air you end up with less air which results in fewer microbes every time you step on the soil you compact that soil that's why it's a good idea to have permanent Pathways we compact the soil there but where the plants are growing we leave that alone try not to step in your garden bed the other thing that compact soil is rain droplets believe it or

not rain droplets are strong enough to come down and pound that soil that's why you get a crust forming on the soil it's pounding wounded soil the structure is gone and it's compacted and that's not good for microbes how do we stop that from happening simple mulch when you put mulch over the soil The Mulch takes the impact of the Raindrop and your soil is preserved now a lot of you think tilling reduces compaction and it does for a short period of time but in fact below the line in which you loosen the soil you

actually compact it and you destroy soil structure which is also so important for getting air in so don't tell all right what about water why is water important well we talk about microbes living in soil but the reality is that most microbes don't live in soil they live in water every soil particle has a little bit of water around it and they live in that layer of water most microbes need to be in water so when soil gets too dry what happens well they either die off or many of them will go into a state

of hibernation they'll go dormant they just sit there and do nothing until water returns so it's important to keep your soil watered now you don't want to flood the soil because remember they also need air but we don't want really dry soil again mulch is great because it keeps moisture in the ground keeps microbes happy and that's one reason I'm such a big believer in Mt the third thing that microbes need is food well what do microbes eat well they eat anything that's organic and when I say organic I'm using the term in the chemical

sense not in the certified organic sent that's really not important to microbes so they eat leaves they eat juices from Plants they eat other microbes they eat dead microbes one of the best foods for microbes is compost or manure or partially composted material anything that was living and is on its way to decomposing and in fact that composition process that thing that happens in your compost pile it's done entirely by micro they're slowly eating and digesting all that organic material and that's their favorite food source when we increase the amount of organic material in soil

we provide them with more food which results in more microbes it's really that simple let me give you a little example here let's say you just moved into a new subdivision and the builders have come along they've taken all the top soil off that's where all the microbes in the organic matter live when they take that away then they build the house and then they bring a small amount of that good soil back now people say well the garden's not very good the soil isn't very good in these new homes and you're right because the

good stuff was taken away and now your left with subsoil doesn't have much organic matter it has fewer microbes so what's the solution there it's not to add more microbes the solution is to increase the level of organic matter and when you do that the microbes grow so to increase the microbes in your soil you do three things reduce compaction keep the soil moist and add organic matter really that simple so now you know how to take care of the microbes you have and you even know how to increase the number at organic matter now

I've mentioned compost and manure as being good options some people online promote other things things like molasses and milk but when we add these things we do see a spike in microbes because both of those contain carbon and milk also has some nitrogen in it and that is micro food so we apply that to the soil and what we see is a sudden increase in microbes many of these microbes grow very quickly bacteria in ideal conditions can divide and double in number every 20 minutes so they grow very rapidly and you've just added some masses

and that's great food it's mostly sugar and that's like candy to bacteria they gobble it up they grow they multiply you get this big spike in number and then the food runs out now initially that's not a problem because some of these bacteria are dying off and others eat them so there's still food available but eventually all that food runs out the population crashes and you're back to where you were before molasses and milk and other products like that are not good for feeding microbes compost on the other hand is great cuz it takes them

a long time to decompose that that takes up to 5 years years to decomposing soil and that's continually feeding the microbes during that whole period of time various Garden teas are also highly promoted online things like compost tea manure tea and weed tea you basically take these materials put it in a bucket add some water Stir It Around let it sit for a few days sometimes you add air to speed up that process and what you end up with is this liquid that is just full of nutrients so you apply that to your garden now

that sounds like a great thing to do the problem is the amount of nutrients in the water is still very small in fact most of the nutrients are in the sludge in the bottom of the pale the sludge is more valuable to the microbes than the water is because most of that organic matter hasn't decomposed yet now there's lots of studies looking at this and they do show improved plant growth the problem with these studies is they compareed te's to water and we know that these teas contain nutrients we also know that when we add

nutrients to soil plants grow better there's no magic here you can't compare compost tea to water you have to compare compost tea to compost there are very few studies that have looked at that but the ones that have found the tea makes no difference there is no value in making these various tea concoctions as far as adding nutrients to the soil as far as feeding these microbes there's no point in making these te's another approach to increasing microbes in your soil is to add them and that seems to make so much sense right we have

a billion microbes in a gram of soil why don't we add some to that and we'll we'll have two billion there are some basic flaws in this process the first one is that soil has a maximum capacity for micro there's only room for so many now if you have crappy soil there isn't room for very many I mean we're still talking billions and billions in a garden but that's a small number compared to good soil good soil has a higher capacity it can hold 10 times as many microbes each type of soil has a capacity

and that capacity is pretty much controlled by the amount of food that's available microbes are always at full capacity they multiply so quickly that no matter where they are they m multiply to fill the available space and availability of food when we add more microbes into that situation you don't actually get an increase in number almost all the ones you add die off because there's no room for them I liken this to a football stadium the big game is on the seats are full with fans and another thousand fans show up and want to get

in they can't buy tickets because there's no seats available the stadium is at capacity and having more people arrive does not add more people to the stadium your soil is exactly the same it's always at capacity there's no room for more microbes so adding microbes does not really work you're probably sitting there wondering well just a minute there's all kinds of ways to add these microbes there's all kinds of online information well let's have a close look at some of these ways of adding microbes one of the most common is compost tea so you have

some people who think that compost tea is there to provide nutrients for microbes that's microb food but then you have another group of people who are Brewing the tea to grow microbes they don't care about the nutrients in fact they freely admit the nutrients don't add much value it's the microbes you want so they're Brewing this pale of microbes and then they're spreading the microbes around to increase the number of microbes in soil well there have been many studies on this and the reality is that it doesn't increase the number in soil the reason is

that soil is already at capacity now there have been a few recent studies that have shown that the actual population changes a bit maybe 1% of the population changes but we don't know what effect that has on the soil it may not have any effect at all how many different types of microbes are there in soil well we really don't know the answer to that we think that we've identified about 20% of the microbes that are in soil that means 80% we know nothing about we we do know that there's thousands and thousands of different

species in every soil sound some estimates say there might be as many as 100,000 different species and we don't know anything about most of them and even the 20% that we know something about we actually know almost nothing about how these populations interact in soil the latest hot button I see is photosynthetic bacteria these are bacteria that can actually photosynthesize they use the light and produce organic compound now there are some studies that show that adding these to soil can be effective the problem is that these studies use a specific organism they brew it up

knowing how to brew that organism they measure how much they have and then they apply it to the soil and say h we've seen a change compare that to a gardener a gardener takes a pale of water throws in some kind of compost organic matter there's some soil samples wherever they want they brew it up they get some brown stuff they think they have photosynthetic bacteria and then they spread it around saying hey this stuff really works well they don't know what they're doing they could be creating pathogens and spreading those around when you're brewing

things like compost tea you have no idea what you're Brewing the other option you have is you can go to the store and you can buy microbes for your soil and they're sold under a number of different names uh soil probiotics micro isal fungi beneficial back bacteria em that stands for Effective microbes these are all products that you can buy and they all claim the same thing by adding them to your soil you will increase the number of microbes and you'll end up with better soil well what does the science say about all these products

well let's get back to the number of microbes in soil we're talking thousands tens of thousands of different species and these products usually contain 3 six m maybe a dozen different species and those species have been selected because they're the ones that are easy to grow in a factory they weren't selected because they're the ones that your soil is missing now we take that small number of species we add it to soil that's at capacity and what happens not very much in fact I recently contacted five manufacturers of these products and asked each one of

them to show me the scientific evidence that they have that confirms their product work out of five products not one of them had such a scientific study and since then a sixth one has contacted me bragging about their product and they wanted me to test it so I asked them for a study too they didn't have one either if you look at the marketing material it says microbes in nature work they're important which is true and we have a bottle of microbes so it also works but that doesn't mean that second statement is true now

there is some evidence for very specific microbes they can fight very specific diseases in agricultural situations and there is some scientific evidence that in Dro conditions these micro isof fungi can help out plants so in very stressed conditions they may actually work I haven't found any scientific evidence that they work in your garden and I've talked to four different scientists who actually study micro isof fungi and I asked them should we be adding this to the garden and they said no it probably won't do any good I also asked them we should add it to

potted plants and they said no it doesn't work there either the bottom line is commercial products will not increase the microbes in your garden so how do you increase those microbes well it's really quite simple you add organic matter you feed them and the best things you can use there are compost organic matter and all the vegetation that comes from your garden you leave it in the garden fall Falling Leaves Dead Flowers whatever it is put it in your garden that's organic matter that feeds microbes the second most important thing you can do is to

plant things now you're probably thinking well how does that work I mean plants take nutrients out of soil they're actually competing with microbes for the food and that is true partially but we've learned a lot about plants and they form associations with microbes so what happens around the roots is that plants actually feed the micro 20 to 40% of the photosynthates those are the chemicals that come out of the plant because of photosynthesis are sent down to the roots they're squeezed out of the roots to feed the microbes so around the roots we have this

huge number of microbes and the plant does that for a lot of good reasons those microbes are eating each other and they're releasing nitrogen and that feeds the plant they're also digesting soil particles and that feeds the plant and those microbes protect the plant from pathogen so the plant is growing microbes around its roots so one of the best things you can do to improve soil is grow plants those plants feed the microbes they increase the number of microbes in soil and your soil gets better as plant roots die off that's organic M so plants

are basically creating a compost pile around their roots with which increases the number of microbes so the two things you should do in your garden plant things keep the soil covered at all times and add extra organic matter when possible forget about all the other nonsense on the internet don't Brew teas don't buy concoctions they don't work gardening can be so simple if we just ignore a lot of the garbage that's if you'd like to learn more about microbes have a look at my book microb science for gardener a lot of the information I presented

in this program is expanded in that book and there's whole chapters about these different kinds of microbes and the interaction between microbes and plants microbes really are the key to good garden now if you'd like to learn more about microbes you can also watch this video here and I have a whole series of videos on soil and that's right here take care of your microbes and happy gardening