Fall finds me smiling for many reasons, not least of which is thinking about all the Soil Food Webbers out there happily and diligently applying microbes to the soil. Where do those microbes come from?  Compost of course!

Conventional wisdom would have us see compost as a fertilizer; containing soluble nutrients prone to leaching or washing downhill with the rains.  Certainly, fall is not the time to be applying soluble nutrients.  Most plants don’t require them at this time of year and indeed they do leach when applied to soils without a balanced soil food web, because it is the microorganisms themselves that have the ability to hold onto these nutrients and stop them from leaching in the first place.  Like a soil sponge.

Soil Food Webbers see compost a bit differently.  There are many ways to make compost – the goal of ours is to be teeming with the diversity of microorganisms that plants want to partner with.  As we move away from a philosophy of people being responsible for providing fertility for plants, and toward a mindset of our responsibility being to replace and support missing organisms so that the plant and nature can direct the show, we come to realize that compost has incredible value as a microbial inoculum.  Testing this type of compost would reveal far less nutrients than one might expect.  Why?  Because they have been consumed and tied up in the bodies of the organisms.

Fall is absolutely the best time to get these organisms, and the nutrients they carry, into the soil profile.  Rather than leaching away, they stick themselves to their foods sources and build soil structure.  Fall application allows the time and moisture for them to really settle in so that by spring, when your plants are sending out their call to the organisms below, they are already in place to respond.  A full diversity of organisms and thus predator-prey interactions means that nutrient cycling is already happening, naturally.  It’s a beautiful thing!

You can purchase small amounts of these microbes through www.cow-op.ca.  Inoculate your own compost pile with organisms (be sure to keep adding lots of “brown” materials to feed the fungi) or perhaps top-dress around your favourite plant (add some mulch to protect from rain compaction).  And keep an eye on www.springhillsoil-lab.ca for upcoming workshops on how to make this good stuff yourself.