Healthy soil and sustainable growing

["TradingPostPaul" <tradingpost@riseup.net>]

I'm going to agree with both Pat and Mike on this one. Innoculating for
specific microbes is a daunting task best left to professionals with a
specific need identified (and someone to pay for it). Yet healthy garden
soil is all you need for backyard growing, and you get it with organic
matter like finished compost, cover crops, or green manuring. Yes, soil
science per se is horribly complicated and still evolving. But food growing
is an art. What I've learned personally is mostly a lot of what *not* to
do. There are principles, rules of thumb. There are simple tests. The rest
is just getting a feel for the soil, a relationship with the land if you
will. 

paul, tradingpost@riseup.net
---------------

The outstanding scientific discovery of the twentieth century is not
television, or radio, but rather the complexity of the land organism. Only
those who know the most about it can appreciate how little we know about
it. 
   - Aldo Leopold in  Round River, 1933
*********** REPLY SEPARATOR  ***********

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