Benefits of the Soil Food Web
Health You Can Taste
What a sweet time of year. Well into the growing season there’s such an abundance of produce to delight the taste buds. Biting into juicy locally grown tomatoes, you can detect the difference in flavour across varieties. Maybe you can even taste the difference in the same variety from farm to farm. Contrast this with […]
Capturing Liquid Sunlight
Leaves are like little solar panels. Chasing the sun, they combine solar energy with water and carbon dioxide to make sugary sap. This liquid sunlight, stored in carbon rings, is the foundation of almost all life on earth. We cannot live without it. How well a plant carries out photosynthesis depends on a number of […]
Seeds with Sense
It blows my mind every time: if you look at current estimates of the amount of genetic information in a person, only about 1% of it is human. The rest belongs to microbes (bacteria, archaea, fungi, protozoa) and viruses, co-operating in groups to form “symbionts.” These symbionts perform the functions needed for human life and […]
Let There Be Air
Compaction is a pretty big deal when you’re trying to grow plants. How far can roots go down before they hit “hard pan” and must go sideways? How far can water infiltrate until it, too, must go sideways, leaching soluble nutrients and potentially carrying precious topsoil away? Compaction can be caused by the weight of […]
How’s Your Soil Structure?
It’s always seemed to me like we have a water storage problem, rather than a drought problem, here on the island. Ask any permaculturalist or regenerative farmer the best way to store water and they will tell you, hands down, that it’s in the soil. Storing water this way requires good soil structure, and for […]
Herbs, Weeds, and a Nice Surprise
The most challenging thing about helping people partner with microbes in their gardens is encouraging a shift in mindset. Gardening is a bit like parenting – there are lots of opinions and different ways of doing things, methods are handed down through generations, and results can sometimes be frustrating. Thankfully for soil health (and […]
Water Woes
I’ve been thinking a lot about water these days, standing for what feels like hours on end (it’s really not), hand-watering veggies. Irony wafts around me as I follow the existing drip irrigation system. Why? When I initially had the system installed, the plan was to eventually wean my way off it. This came from […]
It’s Raining Bugs
Well, not quite bugs – microbes! As someone who still squeals every time I see a new type of soil organism beneath the microscope, imagine my delight to discover that these same microbes are an important catalyst for the formation of rain, hail, and snow, and are thought to be responsible for up to 80% […]
Fenna’s Carrots
It’s the last of the dog days of summer (in October!) and we are sitting around a picnic blanket celebrating my youngest’s birthday. The lovely mama next to me is telling us how much she enjoys the sweetness of “Fenna’s carrots.” In two strokes of coincidence, Fenna’s carrots happen to be on the vegetable […]
Connecting Dots and Biomes
Rianna and I crossed paths at a friend’s farm. I was happily hauling buckets of manure, and she was curious. “What are you doing with that?” she asked.