Symbiosis
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 […]
DIY Mycorrhizal Fungi for Veggies
Mycorrhizal fungi are “obligate symbionts”, meaning that they need a host plant to survive. Endomycorrhizal fungi, also called arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi or AMF, are essential partners of 70-90% of all plant species, including the majority of the vegetables in your garden this year. AMF don’t produce mushrooms. They propagate via underground spores, pieces of host […]
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 […]
Seasonal Sampling
Soil biology numbers change across seasonal cycles. Understanding what mediates the flurries of activity of these wee beings is helpful in deciding when and how to check who is home in your soil. Numbers peak when plants are actively growing and excreting “liquid sunshine” through their roots. Soil temperature, moisture and other types of microbe […]
Spring Tips for Nurturing Soil Microbes
With the spring warmth comes that sense of shift in energy and vitality, like something inside us is unfurling. Soil microbes also undergo this transformation, emerging from dormancy to partner again with above-ground life. Plants need both energy and nutrients to unfurl themselves – with the sun and air comes that energy, and with the […]
The Dance of Succession
There’s a dance going on, above and below ground. It’s an intelligent dance – in ways we are just beginning to understand – and it’s synergistic, responsive and adaptive. Plants and microorganisms engaged together, living and dying, as nature moves forward in succession from rock to old growth forest over vast amounts of time. So […]
Ancient Relationships
In our fragmented society, where concepts of competition and survival of the fittest pervade our way of life, we could learn a thing or two from one of the oldest of relationships. Somewhere around 600 million years ago fungi and algae formed a collaboration that allowed algae to move out of the sea and onto […]
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.