Healthy soil and sustainable growing

[Soilsecrets@aol.com]

Hi Pat,

 

It is a very forgiving endeavor growing soil for the sake of growing plants and for the most part you can get away with the methods you proposed such as using lots of organics.  But there is a basic problem found across the country if not the world that many PhD candidates have studied to death and earned their credentials on.  Here's the problem: Almost without exception when looking at soils on farms, yards, gardens, golf courses, parks and even long term (30 years) certified organic farms there is never a strong mutualistic relationship between plants and the associated root-colonizing bacteria and mycorrhizal fungi.  When plants lack the full potential of these beneficial infections they cannot uptake water or mineral nutrients at optimum levels.  Therefore you will have limiting tolerable limits to drought, disease, environmental stresses, and insects.  Adding super high quality compost to your garden soil at the appropriate amounts and intervals will not be adding these microbes and does not guarantee that they will appear on their own.  For example, we have a client that is one of the oldest continuous certified organic farms in the world that did not believe me when I gave them that same point.  They did however allow us to inoculate a trial field where the results could be quantified.  The crop produced was enough to convince them that I was right and that the whole farm needed to be inoculated on a regular basis.  They have seen increasing yields, decrease of insect pressure, decrease need for irrigation, improved quality of product and a measured improved nutrient content to the product.  Results are consistent, dependable and reliable when we treat farms, golf courses and any other landscape with microbiology. We treat each year 27,000 acres of farm land that is owned by just one farm family.  If you eat lettuce, you've eaten lettuce from this farm that has been inoculated by Soil Secrets. 

 

Dr. Michael Martin Melendrez