Skip to Content.
Sympa Menu

livingontheland - Re: [Livingontheland] Collecting soil from the wild to inoculate your own soil

livingontheland@lists.ibiblio.org

Subject: Healthy soil and sustainable growing

List archive

Chronological Thread  
  • From: "TradingPostPaul" <tradingpost@riseup.net>
  • To: livingontheland@lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: Re: [Livingontheland] Collecting soil from the wild to inoculate your own soil
  • Date: Fri, 07 Jul 2006 09:09:28 -0600


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







Archive powered by MHonArc 2.6.24.

Top of Page