Healthy soil and sustainable growing

[Soilsecrets@aol.com]

The question from this forums reader is: With all the talk about good fungi and bacteria, and the realization that not all helpful ones occur in a given soil (ie. innoculation is needed), would it be a good idea to simply collect good soil samples when you
travel, and innoculate your own soil with everything you can find?

 

Answer: Collecting soil for that objective will not work.  You will need to collect living root material from the host plant that you desire to perpetuate the  root-colonizing mutualistic mycorrhizal association including the helper bacteria.  You will then need to find a way to keep them viable until you can get them back to a lab and do a careful extraction without damaging these very fragile tissues including the spores, endospores, propagules and vesicles.  Time will be of the essence as this material has a limited viability before becoming infected with parasitic microbiology.  Once an extraction is completed you will need to have a taxonomist in microbiology examine the collection to make sure you have not accidentally collected undesirable material that could lead to long term pathogenic problems.  Think Sudden Oak Death or Chili Wilt for example.  It's for this reason that professional commercial growers of mutualistic microbiology must have the ability to grow many thousands of species of plants, have greenhouse facilities and grow 100's of thousands if not millions of plants per year in large containers sizes in order to collect enough microbiology to satisfy a small demand for the product.  There are only a few such companies in the United States that actually do this. 

 

The business of finding, identifying, harvesting, propagating and  perpetuating the complex world of soil and root microbiology is very complicated and unfortunately grossly oversimplified by the organic fertilizer and soil amendment industries, who for the most part are selling 'Bugs in a Jug' and not reality.

 

Dr. Michael Martin Melendrez