A complete guide to soil microbiology.

welcome back to the food forest everybody today i want to go and delve deep into the science of soil microbiology and before you turn this video off i want you to understand that soil microbiology and understanding the science behind why plants grow is probably the single most important thing that you can do in terms of improving your yield out of your land if you're a gardener even if you're a home gardener and you're only growing veggies i'm going to try to boil this down to high level stuff but at the same time do a deeper dive than i normally do on my videos one more thing before i get started my background is in science but it's in mechanical engineering i'm not a so expert in soul microbiology although i have probably read more textbooks on soil microbiology than in actual you know my my studied field if you did want an actual textbook on this my recommendation would be one called soil microbiology ecology and biochemistry by elder a paul if you don't want an actual textbook but you do want a fun book to read on this topic i suggest growing your soil by diane messler and dr elaine ingham also teaming with microbes by jeff lowenfels or teeming with fungi by the same author fundamentals of soil ecology by david coleman and one of my favorite books of all time restoration agriculture by mark shepard these are great permaculture books that talk about soil science but again if you want the actual like an actual university level textbook definitely go with soil microbiology ecology and biochemistry everything that i say in these videos is coming from sources like this even though i am you know technically a scientist this this is not my field of expertise so the words coming out of my mouth and the things i'm going to teach you in this video they're not coming from me they're coming from actual world experts so feel free to pick up some of these books and compare it to the stuff that i'm telling you today but it's always good to get the actual information from the source not from a secondhand telling like we often do on youtube but i like to kind of take it you know to a bit of a more credible degree than most youtube channels do by actually reading the science and then relaying to you guys the science not just some kind of personal opinion or something that i read off of a mommy blog on pinterest alright let's get to it soil microbiology the importance in your garden and this will change a lot of things about what you do in your garden how you fertilize your plants even if you're not using chemical fertilizers if you're using organic fertilizers or completely natural fertilizers like a chop and drop or a comfrey tea a manure tea these are fertilizers and i want to get across scientific information so that when you see someone making a conferee tea without a bubbler you know you start to question do they know what they're doing do they even understand when you see youtube videos on putting anaerobic compost into your gardens uh you know what are they actually doing to the soil microbiology let's get to it so first i want to talk about nutrient available in the soil there's actually enough nutrients available in dirt across the world it's just locked up in the sand silt and clay that makes up dirt the difference between dirt and soil is dirt is basically sand silt and clay which are just varying sizes of rocks and minerals that's all that means it's just different sizes of stone sand is the largest stone silt is the medium stone and clay is the finer particle but they're all just different sizes of stone put those three things together and you have dirt of varying composition you might have heavy clay you might have heavy sand it literally just means the size of the particles of the stone that makes up the dirt the difference between dirt and soil is that you add life into the dirt and now you have soil now you have a functioning food web of life and this is critically important because the plants have no ability to get nutrients out of the actual minerals and elements that are inside the stone so what does microscopic bacteria actually use acids to melt and break apart the stone and they can actually consume the minerals inside the stone so if you have a tomato plant that needs calcium it can't get calcium just straight from the sand silt and clay it needs a bacteria to come and melt it with acid get that calcium out of the stone and then absorb it in their bodies bacteria basically create the tiny little particles that make up something called soil aggregates they make the glue that will bind together all these tiny little elements into larger particles that the soil fungi can actually access and then the soil plants can actually access now dr elaine ingham has a great analogy for this and it is that the bacteria basically turn dust and dirt into bricks they actually turn the dust and dirt into bricks that you're gonna now make a house with and what she's describing is the soil structure that microbiology will live in they need to live in a house just like we need to live in a house and it's the bacteria that turn the dust and the dirt into bricks that they can then use for a house now the soil fungi comes along and they actually take those bricks and they make an actual house out of it they create the mortar between the bricks they will glue it all together okay so now the bacteria has made bricks the fungi has made a house with the bricks but it's not really useful yet we have a soil structure that microbiology can live in but we actually don't have food yet so what we need to do is now take all that nutrient and make it bioavailable by a process called chelation to boil it down simply chelation is taking a mineral element like a calcium of phosphorus and magnesium and binding it to an amino acid a protein and now the plant can actually use that actual element to feed itself so how the plant does this is something called plant root exudates okay so now we come to photosynthesis and how critically important this is and this is where all my sayings on youtube come from this maximize photosynthesis maximize solar panels maximize the energy coming into your black box of a garden because remember the plants can't feed themselves so the only way they can feed themselves is extracting the nutrient out of the soil aggregate out of the soil particles making aggregates and creating a soul food web of life the way that they do that is the plant root exudates and they create plant root exudates by photosynthesis so the plants get energy from the sun they combine that with water in the ground and carbon dioxide in the air and they make oxygen which everyone knows that part of the photosynthesis equation but they often don't talk about plus sugars it's the sugars that are the really important thing for soil microbiology because these sugars the plant then doesn't take for themselves they take a little bit but what they really do with the sugars is they actually give that back the plants are like someone working a line at a soup kitchen and they're giving food out to everybody else for no benefit from themselves right actually plants are doing this because they're selfish and they want to grow and they can't get the nutrients themselves so they need microbiology to do it for them so the plants actually have evolved an ability to trick soil microbiology to coming close to the plant roots to eat these sugars because soil microbiology loves sugars what do people say to amend into gardens they say to put powdered molasses sugar stuff like that is really good for pumping bacteria when we make kombucha when we make fermented foods often we'll put sugar in not for the food but to feed the biology that is fermenting our food for us so plants know this and they put that sugar out and the sugar is basically protein a little bit of fat and a lot of carbohydrates in cooking when you have a lot of sugar a little bit of protein a little bit of fat and you bake that into something you're basically making cookies and cakes again this these analogies are all coming from dr elaine these are not my analogies so when you're making these cookies and cakes you're sending very specific cookies and cakes out to very specific soil microbiology in order to access things that those soil microbiology naturally bioaccumulate in their bodies so if there's a bacteria that naturally bioaccumulates calcium because it likes to eat calcium the plant will actually release a soil plant root exudate to specifically attract that one so it will release a raspberry centered multi-sprinkled donut that that bacteria knows you know it's the cookie or cake or donut that that specific bacteria likes it will release that into the soil and it knows that that little bacteria will come and eat that and because the life cycle of a bacteria is so short that bacteria will live die it will excrete nutrients like all living things do and once it dies the cells in its bodies will now rupture and now the plant can actually access those nutrients it can get it from their dead bodies and the decomposition cycle that will happen and it can get it from their pee in their poo these nutrients are now chelated calcium for example this calcium is now bound to an amino acid it's bound to a fulvic acid it's bound to a humic acid and now the plant can actually take it up into its bodies use that calcium in his leaves stems and fruit and put out a tomato for us the plant absolutely depends on the soil microbiology in order to do this all right so let's take a breather that's a pretty intense hammering of soil microbiology but i want to talk this is a great point to kind of stop and and we'll talk about soil tests now soil tests when you get your soil sent to a lab and it comes back and it says it has lots of nitrogen it doesn't have enough nitrogen carbon organic material and then it goes through all the trace elements it's really important to know it's critically important to know that those soil tests measure soluble elements it measures things that are soluble in water what they can't measure what those soil tests absolutely cannot measure is the amount of nutrient bound up inside a bacteria's body inside of a fungus's body and then also bound up inside the humic and fulvic acids it can tell there's humic and fulvic acid there but it can't tell is that a phosphate that's bound to that humic acid or is it a manganese or is it calcium it doesn't know iron so it can only tell you what your soluble content of iron and calcium and magnesium are so soil tests are valuable for when you're starting a project and you are looking at dead bare soil because there's no life in the soil binding those nutrients up it'll kind of tell you what you have as a base layer but again it can't tell you how much calcium you have inside of a large sand particle it can just tell you how much soluble calcium you have and then it can infer from that how much you have in the sand particle but it can't actually tell you and this is important because if you're going to get a soil test before and after you do something like a no-till heavy wood chip style mulch garden that you know myself and many others really push on people because they create a soul a dense healthy soul food web of life if you're going to do a before and after soil test on that it's going to be drastically misleading by several orders of magnitude hundreds and hundreds of times it will under represent how much bioavailable nutrient you have in the after-story and to boil that down to useful information literally all you need to know is that your soil has everything it needs in it for your plants to grow it's just missing the soil life so if you can get your soil a little money right there oh my god that's so cute so if you can establish a soil food web of life on your property then you know that you have enough soil health and the best way to test for soil health is actually to just look at the plants did the plants look healthy if the plants look healthy they have everything they need now there are two very small exceptions to this which is mace basically phosphorus and boron these are two elements that are fairly rare in soils most of our phosphorus comes from africa it's mine in africa and very devastating like ecologically devastating processes and then it's shipped around the world and boron is just low everywhere now you can amend your soil with boron by adding borox the uh you know the cleaning agent it's actually safe for the soil you can add that to your soil to get your boron up your phosphorus if you don't have phosphorus it's going to be hard for you to get phosphorus however most soils these days have enough phosphorus they just don't have access to it so when we simplify it really the only actions you need to take are things that maximize the soil food web of life which means mulch dense planting lots of photosynthesis going into the soil for lots of food for the soil food web of life and get that soil food web of life growing and multiplying and your plants will be happy and if you look at my video called what are the two secrets of garden or my my two golden rules of gardening this will change how you garden forever it goes over this in detail about not the science behind it a little bit of that but mostly the actions that you should take in order to do this and it's all based on the science that you'll find in this video okay so a big stink in gardening is nitrogen everyone knows plants use nitrogen to grow the leaves of their plants but what kind of nitrogen the main sources of nitrogen are nitrites nitrates and ammonium there's nitrogen contained in some other complex organic molecules but for the most part your plants are going to get their nitrogen from one of these three sources where do those three sources come from and when you get a soil test saying how many nitrates nitrites you have it can help you identify which of the soil food web of life cycles are actively working very hard and maybe also which ones are deficient and another big source of nitrogen is free nitrogen that comes from rain when rains fall down on the ground they're falling through an atmosphere mostly of nitrogen and they'll scrub it out they'll suck nitrogen into the little uh water droplet they'll pull nitrogen molecules in and then they'll bring that down to the soil so the rain will drop will splash and that nitrogen will go down into the soil this is why you know grasses and plants have a big flush of green growth after a rainstorm it's not only the water that they're getting that's causing that big green flush it's the nitrogen so let's talk now a little bit about the different sources of nitrogen in the soil food web of life cycle and where they come from and what it means for your soil the first source of nitrogen excluding the rain of the soil microbiology nitrogen nitrates nitrites and ammonium comes from actually nitrogen fixing plants and these plants make nitrites so this comes from a symbiotic relationship with a root bacteria these plants can actually pull nitrogen out of the atmosphere put it into little clusters in the roots i talk about this in a lot of videos so i don't want to go over it too much but then they store that nitrogen in their roots mostly for the plant itself that's pulling the nitrogen but we can release it through grazing to the rest of the soil food web of life what really should happen to this nitrogen is that it gets converted to ammoniums and it gets converted to nitrates now interestingly enough these nitrites are actually mildly toxic to plants they don't really like the nitrites however when bacteria will consume the nitrites they'll turn it into nitrates now once the larger scale microbiology eats the smaller scale microbiology they're going to start urinating and the urine the urea will basically convert into ammoniums urea is like co n2h4 and then ammonium is nh4 okay so why am i talking about all this boring stuff i'm gonna tie it together right now why am i talking about the nitrogen cycle and soil microbiology because it's really really important so i've talked about the ecological transition before where you go from a weed pet to grassland soils to a brush land to a forest to an old growth forest and as you transition along that path i've talked about how the soil goes from bacterial dominated soil towards fungal dominated soil now i've talked about that before what i've never mentioned before in discussing that because it's never really been relevant is how the forms of nitrogen change from one bacterial dominated soil to the end state of fungal dominated soil in a bacterial dominated soil you're mostly going to have nitrates and this is because your soil food web of life isn't going to be as robust you're not going to have the fungus that all the fungal eating nematodes like to eat you're not going to have them there for and you're not going to have the higher level creatures that eat them and all the way down the food chain the food chain is going to be slightly depressed in a bacterial dominated soil and because of that most of the nitrogen is going to exist as nitrates in an all-growth forest you have pretty much the same amount of bacteria and even though it's fungally dominated it's not that the bacteria gets reduced it's just that it kind of stays the same and the fungal component grows and grows and grows and towards the old growth forest or even just you know a forest soil ecosystem you have a lot of fungus because you have a lot of fungus you have a lot of fungal eating nematodes because you have them you have a lot of higher food chain level creatures and all those creatures urinate and produce urea which gets turned into ammonium and it's this ammonium that trees and bushes really like nitrates on the other hand no3 this is actually what weeds like this is what pioneering species like so as your soil food web of life grows and as your fungal component grows and your soil transitions towards a fungally dominated soil you're actually going to stop growing weeds for the reasons that your forms that your nitrogen is going to be bound up in is your it's going to be bound up in ammoniums and not so much nitrates so what this means is as you mulch with wood chips as you build your soil as you continue to add more plants into your soil and you put more root exudates into the ground you create more bacterial food for the protozoa to eat and their populations grow and then now you have more food for for the nematodes and their population grows as you get these higher level organisms in your soil you're going to start producing more ammonium and because your nitrogen is all in the form of ammonium you're actually going to be weeding less so this is really good news for gardeners who don't like to deal with weeds constantly if you're constantly resetting your soils by pulling all your weeds out you're pulling out the root exudate factories out of your soil that are pumping nutrients into your soil and because of that you're restricting your soil food web of life and because of that you're producing more nitrates than ammoniums and because of that you're creating more weeds so you're actually pulling your weeds out but by doing that you're creating more weeds so this is how we can use science in order to reduce the amount of weeding that we have to do in our gardens and again even though the problems get more complex even though everything seems more difficult and you know hard to wrap your brain around the actions are still the same stop destroying your soil food web of life stop tilling stop pulling your weeds out allow your soils to transition and grow towards all growth forest soils and you're going to get less weeding in your food forest because of that more fungally dominated soils more wood chips more plants don't just go with wood chips and trees at 50-foot centers and nothing else in between because what do you lose when you do that you lose the plants which are the root exudate factories you're gonna shrink your soil food web of life and you're just not gonna get to the point where you're producing a lot of ammoniums in your ground versus nitrates all right is this information overload let's look at a dog in a cowboy costume for a bit and just kind of decompress [Music] [Music] okay so let's bring this back around to your soil mineral type your sand your silt or your clay because that's another common question that i get asked all the time and it can very much be solved by soil microbiology oftentimes people will especially on the clay side they'll say i have heavy clay i can't grow anything and you can't grow anything because clay is that small particle so when you put a lot of those small particles together they block everything up picture an empty jar and you're filling in different size golf balls and bowling balls maybe a bigger jar bowling balls soft hard balls baseballs gummies nerd candy all that kind of stuff and you're filling that jar up if you fill that jar up with a whole bunch of really small particles all of a sudden you can't get the big particles in because it's basically clogged up and when you pour water in it can actually pool on the top surface because there's so much the surface area the cracks between it are so small and water has something called van der waals forces that it's really hard to pull that water down in a very small skinny space so the water can tend to pool on top of very small particle sizes whereas for large particle sizes like sand the water will just fall through it right through the bottom and be gone forever it'll drain right away and your plants will get a little bit of water during a rain but then that'll be it it'll be long gone so plants that do well in sand are things that want that they like that they like a little bit of water but then they want that water gone stuff that does well in clay is much a smaller bra sample size of plants because pretty much no plants want to be sitting in pure water running water would be one thing where constantly oxygen is being fed to the roots but plant roots need to respire and they need oxygen so sometimes we'll get a soil test and it'll come back that we have heavy clay it's really hard to fix that in fact it's almost impossible to fix that unless you literally excavate your soil mix it up you know add sand to it add silt to it mix it up and then re-put it all back down you're not going to do that if you have a really small garden you might do that on a small scale but you're not going to do that on any kind of large scale at all it doesn't make any sense and the good news is is that you don't need to do that so if we can get a soil food web of life going and we can get the bacteria taking those tiny little clay particles and kind of breaking them down into like powders and then gluing them together into larger soil aggregates then we can actually change what used to be clay into a porous soil structure so you can have somebody who knows soil inside and out and they can walk over to your property take a handful of your soil look at it and say you have heavy clay you can do a soil test and confirm it that person knows their soil they know what heavy clay looks like you can do a deep wood chip method you can put plants in get that soil food web of life fed and kicking and in a year's time when you come to do another soil test the same person might come and take a look at your soil and say well you've actually created a loam so you have a you know a clay loam but it's almost like a full loam soil nothing changed you still actually could have 80 percent clay that you started with the only difference is now you actually have soil aggregates and a soil structure based on the soil food web of life so when people ask how do i fix too much sand how do i fix too much clay how do i fix anything this goes back to bill mollison's quote that even though the problems of the world seem to get increasingly more complex the solutions remain fairly simple and it applies here because even though there's so many reasons why your system has gotten out of balance so many things that can cause your plants to die the solution is actually always the same thing it is to grow soil it's to grow the soil food web of life it solves every single problem that you can have in your garden and this is why tilling is such a terrible strategy because if you think about a microscopic soil micro organism in the soil and then you have a giant rototiller come and literally rip their city up break apart all the bricks and their houses that are all glued together forming structure for them breaking apart that fungal mycelial net that's holding and weaving it all together and transporting nutrients everywhere you can see how devastating that would be to a little soil microbiology it would be like aliens coming down with a giant machine that just absolutely you know rips up 150 feet deep of soil turns it all churns it all breaks houses apart chews people in half and then puts it all back and then tries to rebuild a civilization on top of that and they do it every single year or say every single generation so just as soon as one generation has started to have kids and you know rebuild their society here comes those stupid aliens tearing it all apart again that's what we do when we till our soils and now that you understand the importance of the soul food web of life and how they make nutrients in the sandstone clay available to your plants you can start to really see just how stupid tilling actually is okay so we've done a lot of talking about bacteria and fungus in your soil those are just two of the parts of the soil food web of life we are now going to go into the larger beings and we're going to start with protozoa now protozoa are still microscopic and their favorite food is actually bacteria so when your plant is putting out these little liquid cakes and sugars out of its roots to attract the bacteria towards the plant roots what it's also doing is attracting the predators of that bacteria and that's protozoa protozoa will then come and eat the bacteria and swell in population after the bacteria swells in population so in a similar way if we do something like throw powdered molasses all over our soil food web of life what we're going to do is cause a very quick increase in the number of bacteria that we have in our soul food web of life and very shortly after our bacteria is going to swell i'm not really a fan of causing these big shrink swell things and throwing systems that should be coming into balance into imbalance in any way i think the better solution to do is to do a slower approach where if we want more bacteria in the soil we don't throw a bunch of molasses in the ground we put more plants in the ground and more plants will create more exudates to make more bacteria so we do it that way it's a slower process and it'll take your system that's kind of balanced and it'll just boost it a little bit instead of taking your system that's balanced and send it for a big swell of bacteria and then the nematodes come and eat them all and the bacteria crashes because there's so many nematodes and now you're in the same problem that you were where you're not maybe not getting enough nutrient availability to your plants because you just crashed your bacteria population by swelling your bacteria population so whenever we're creating imbalances to the system it should be done slowly and carefully so your protozoa are eating your bacteria and now along comes things that eat the protozoa because your protozoa population has exploded and the main thing that eats protozoa are nematodes and microarthropods and now we're getting into a very interesting part of biology where each of the larger organisms actually are mostly spaceships carrying around a symbiotic relationship of the smaller organisms so for example inside of a worm's gut inside a worm's digestive system is one of the most complex environments for bacteria to grow in and this is why worm castings and warm poop is such a valuable source of nutrients for your garden because they're not just pooping out the nutrients they're pooping out nutrients that have been chelated through dead and consumed bacteria through dead and consumed protozoa that's all inside their bodies and inside their poop so anytime that we can raise the complexity of a system we get all the benefits all the inherent benefits of all the micro particles underneath that make up the complexity of the system when we just started out talking about soil microbiology we had sand silk clay bacteria and a little bit of fungi now we're talking about worms who are acting as spaceships carrying around colonies of bacteria inside of them human beings you know the top of the food chain we bio accumulate all of this stuff all this goes into our food we eat the food bacteria is on the food and especially if we're raw foraging and eating raw foods then we're consuming and inoculating our bodies with all of this microbiology it's why probiotics are such a big thing for us and it's a way that we can unlock the nutrients in the food that we eat by eating the microbiology as well okay now the larger soil microbiology is really important because if we go around just amending a fertilizer into our soils for example we're going to put a bunch of ions into the ground and we already know that 80 of water-soluble fertilizers that go into the ground will actually end up just leaching straight through the ground into the water table and it ends up into our lakes rivers and oceans but even the rest of the fertilizer that might make it to the plant roots there is a ton of bacteria and protozoa and nematodes sitting right near the plant roots that are going to intercept those nutrients before it gets to the plant and they're going to hold it and store it in their bodies eventually the like the cycle of life will poop it out but what we're really doing when we put those fertilizers down is we're putting kind of like coarse nutrients into the soil it's almost like we're spraying onto our fields sand silt and clay because the sandstone clay go into the bacteria and then enter the food soil web of life that way and come out chelated on the other end most of the organic fertilizer that we put down is going to end up washed away and the stuff that's not water soluble is going to end up eaten by the bacteria anyway so a lot of people don't realize this that when they fertilize their soils they're actually really not getting it to the plants and they're pretty much doing the same as if they just spread some rock dust on the ground it's a little bit better than that some will make it to the plants but for the most part that's what's happening so what's more important than that is to actually feed the bacteria instead of these soluble nutrients to actually feed them root exudates and we can do that much more simply just by spreading seed and planting more densely and getting more plants pumping sugars down into the ground so when you see a dense garden what you're really seeing is nature's fertilizer pumping fertilizer into the ground 24 7. and that is why these dense systems work so well and that's why when i hear people say i shouldn't plant a plant near my tree because it's actually going to steal nutrients from my tree do you see how silly that is now that you understand a little bit more about soil microbiology the plant literally cannot steal nutrients from the other plant in fact that plant is pumping more nutrients into the soil so there's more more bacterial and there's more nutrient chelation getting built up in the system so the plant is actually a source of fertility not a sucking of fertility now the area that that breaks down in is when you don't protect your soil life and when you have bare soils and your soil microbiology is getting fried from the sun and then you're applying a fertilizer a liquid fertilizer to your plants and that is their main source and it's you know a discrete amount of fertilizer that's going to your plants then yes more plants drinking from the same juice box is actually going to deplete and suck out the nutrients so it's true but only in the destructive industrial agriculture framework it's not true that plants steal nutrients in the actual regenerative system and the regenerative model of a permaculture food forest and i don't want you to think of permaculture food forest as this new revolutionary thing it's the industrial agriculture side of how we grow food that is the abhorrent abnormality that we're talking about here that is the thing that's only existed for a short time the permaculture food forest way of growing densely with lots of solar panels and a robust soil food web of life that's literally just called nature that's just what mother earth does to grow plants and it's what works now the whole soil food web of life is equally as important as anything else because if we have a swell in bacteria then we basically are going to capture all the nutrients around our roots and tie it up in bacteria and even fungus we don't just want soils with just bacteria and fungus we're going to have dead plants we're not going to have the nutrient cycling we need the protozoa to come and eat the bacteria and then you know excrete the nutrients back out the other side in a chelated or bioavailable form similarly if we don't have nematodes to eat the protozoa then we're going to have a swell of protozoa and they're going to eat all of our bacteria and then now we're not going to be able to pull those nutrients out of the minerals of the sand silt and clay and create the soil structure with the aggregates that we need so if we don't have any part of the food chain then everything kind of collapses and that is the whole thing with ecosystem balance is that every organism in the whole entire ecosystem is equally as valuable even if they themselves only serve a function of eating and consuming and keeping something else in balance so this is why things like nemocides are absolutely reckless and stupid because yes there are root eating nematodes and they will eat and kill your plants but there are other nematodes that eat protozoa and by dude god by spraying nemocide everywhere and just whole heart killing all the nematodes we're killing the beneficial and the root eating nematodes as well and we're causing these imbalances in general if a human takes an action to try to write the system especially if they don't know what they're doing and in terms of soil microbiology you basically can't know because it's it's all microscopic how do you know what you're impacting so if a human goes out and sprays nemocide for example then they're causing such a huge disturbance and their whole entire system is going to suffer for it okay so now we know we need to build that soil food web of life you guys are probably asking what's the best way to grow it like how do i actually grow this and i've only given you one option which is plant more plants but if you don't have the soil microbiology to grow the plants then how are you gonna grow the soil microbiology how are you actually gonna get there and that comes down to compost compost is the single most important thing that you can do for your garden because it's the best way to inoculate your soils with a plethora millions and billions of different soil organisms to get them into your system and create that balance once we've got the balance once we've protected our soil microbiology with mulch and plants to shade the soil and break the winds from wicking away moisture in the soil and then the plants also feeding the soil food web of life once we get that going it's impossible to stop without a direct you know and very massive you know impetus to push it in the wrong direction like spraying them aside or something stupid like that pesticides herbicides aside from doing i'm gonna have to do this in a different spot because of this frog [Music] aside from doing that and forgive the plane so funny try to do a video and you get all this stuff so aside from planting more plants to get more sugars into the soil to build their soil microbiology that way the next best way a hundred percent is compost now i have a guide on how to make compost and you should check that out for sure it's the i call it the ultimate composting guide if you're not composting yet you really should be not only for returning those nutrients back into your soil but for a constant yearly flush and re-inoculation of the soil microbiology into your gardens and food forest and if you've already mulched some people ask how do i put the compost on the best way just wait before a rainstorm sprinkle some compost on right we're just trying to get that soil microbiology down into the soil so just sprinkle some on each little gram of compost is going to have billions of soil microbiology organisms in it and then the rains will bring it down so if you know a rainstorm is coming go to your compost pile make sure it's aerobic and then sprinkle that onto your food forest let's talk about the aerobic thing because this is critical okay now i've mentioned before that the line in the sand between good guys and bad guys is basically is there oxygen present in the soil the soil microbiology will live or die based on if there's enough oxygen and there's basically two camps there's the anaerobic and the aerobic soil microbiology the difference is massive the anaerobic are the pathogens and they are the disease creators and it's because they create some of the most toxic compounds known to plants it's how they break things up we do lots of anaerobic ferments when we cook but we shouldn't be then putting that on our plants and if you see somebody who is making you know some kind of compost tea and they're making it anaerobic and they're saying what's the big deal it's anaerobic it doesn't matter and they're putting that on their gardens it's a big deal and this is also why we should be regularly turning our compost whether we do that with chickens and the chickens are doing the turning or we do it ourselves or we use some kind of pipe that goes through our compost with air holes to get air going into our compost it's really important that it stays aerobic and the reason for this is that anaerobic microbiology will actually break down your phosphates into phosphine gases it will break down your sulfates into hydrogen sulfide and it will create alcohols and vinegars and if anyone thinks that it's a good idea to go spread their rum in their food forest go nuts if anyone thinks it's a good idea to put vinegar all over your garden go try it and tell me what happens these are toxic chemicals to plants and they happen in an anaerobic environment and worst of all of this stuff is that a lot of them are gases so when you have an anaerobic compost i've already talked about how phosphorus is a very difficult nutrient to keep if you're releasing phosphine gas in your compost then you're losing all your phosphorus out of the soil that's going to be going back into your garden so not only are you spreading pathogens into your garden but you're also losing all the nutrients in your compost because they're being released as gases and acids in fact an anaerobic compost pile can drop its ph down to a low as low as two and ph is a logarithmic scale so going from seven down to two is actually an increase in acidity of a hundred thousand times more acidic it's massive and if you think you can grow plants in a ph of two there are very few plants in the world that can grow in that kind of soil condition if you want to drop your ph there are other ways to do it and if you want to grow compost you absolutely need to do aerobic compost now in an oxygen heavy compost pile the aerobic microbiology will be able to out-compete the anaerobic microbiology the phosphorus will be stored as phosphate which is po4 that sulfur will be stored as sulfate which is so4 and these compounds can only be created obviously if there's oxygen these compounds will stay in your compost pile so that it gets returned to the soil when your soils go anaerobic and you have this anaerobic microbiology getting into the soil all your other bacteria are going to die and the ones that actually will pull the nutrients out of the sand sultan clay to kind of make the bricks and the mushrooms that take those bricks to make houses are going to basically die they're going to die back and when they die back your soil is compact and when your soil is compact they go even more anaerobic so a little small nudge in the anaerobic direction is really bad at breaking down that soil structure that we need to make get that oxygen coming down into our soils to get the fungus you know opening up the soils creating root aggregate aggregates that will kind of spread the soils out that will get water infiltration deep down into our soils that will make a pure clay loam look like an actual mix sand silk clay loam it'll look like a perfect loam if it goes anaerobic and that soil structure collapses it's going to just look like pure clay because it's going to go from soil it's going to revert down to dead dirt and you're going to get dead plants so i don't know what do you guys think i think that's enough for now i have an a list of stuff that i'd like to talk about but just creating this video i know this is going to be a monster video already so i think we've got to cut it short there the takeaways i want to summarize those right here on actionable things that you should be doing in your garden now that you understand soil microbiology number one is you need to protect your soil food web of life that means you need to plant lots and lots and lots of plants we want to feed them as much as possible if we look at our garden as a black box and we can put more energy into the black box then we're going to get more energy out of the black box it's simple thermo dynamics and in this house we obey the laws of thermodynamics so if we can get more energy in we can get more food out and how do we get that energy in from the sun now the sun will either come and just bake our ground and put so much energy into our soil that our soil microbiology gets literally cooked and dies or we can cover it with tons of plants and the photosynthesis energy from the sugars going into the soils that's all free energy we've got this wonderful ball of fire in this in the sky pumping free energy to our planet energy crisis shouldn't exist on the planet earth we have so much energy hitting us every single minute of every single day so if you want to maximize the health and fertility of your garden if you want to get as much nutrients into your garden why are you amending with fertilizers when literally all you need to do is plant more plants and get that soil microbiology pumping so first actionable thing for you out of this video if you have bare space in your garden fill that space with plants if you want to keep things nice and tidy and organized go with the ground cover layer that's totally fine super short plants and ideally maybe a nitrogen fixer to get more nitrites into your ground that are going to turn into nitrates and ammonium through the bacteria protozoa and nematode chain basically the poop chain so you want to get that going as much as possible as many plants as you can number two piece of actionable advice in this video is start making your own compost make sure that it is aerobic check out my ultimate compost guide go through that i'll go over different modes of compost you can do if you're going to do something anaerobic like a bokashi make sure that you put it into a bubbler at the end and maybe bubble it for a couple weeks just to get more oxygen in kill those anaerobes and get the entire thing going aerobic so that you're inoculating your soils with aerobic microbiology same thing if you're doing some kind of syngas or biogas style digester make sure that the final process before it goes in your garden is one where you bubble air into it you can get these from an aquarium store it's just a bubbler it's just a compressor that just pumps air straight out of a hose so start growing your own compost start turning it it's actually super fun to do your own compost and get that going it sounds dumb but sometimes i think that i garden just so that i can compost it's actually really interesting and fun to see a bunch of dead junk turn into pure black gold and then put that into your gardens and make sure you're amending that and again if you're doing a no-till heavy mulch system how do you amend that you basically just sprinkle it just before a rain and let the rains bring down the soil microbiology right down into the soils number three if you want to go the extra mile and you want to do in a compost tea i have a video called boosting your fertility where i show you myself making a comfrey tea this is like a natural liquid fertilizer and it's basically taking the nutrients in a comfrey leaf brewing it as like a tea that you don't drink you give to the plants brewing it as a tea using a bubbler to keep it aerobic and then spraying that as a foliar spray onto your leaves and then you can also put some into your soil so these are ways that you can boost the soil food web of life and just remember when all things are said and done we try to minimize the disturbance in the soil as much as possible because we depend on the soil food web of life to grow our plants thanks for watching i hope you got something useful out of this video i'm guessing a lot of people did if you made it this far congratulations you are now a certifiable plant nerd and you should probably buy a t-shirt letting everyone know that you are a plant nerd and that if they start talking plants to you you're going to talk to the talk their ear off spread this word to other gardening friends that you have it's really important that we grow plants that is in a way that is sustainable that we can continue doing for the rest of human existence on this planet because industrial agriculture is ecologically devastating it is putting poison into our water and there is a massive um industrial chain of manufacture and mining that goes along with it and it's all completely unnecessary we do need to eat food we do depend on them so another way that we can fight it is by reducing our dependence on them by getting new gardeners every day so send those new gardeners my way and i'll convert them all to plant geeks thanks for watching toodaloo did i just say toodaloo what the heck man see you later bye thanks for watching come around again thanks for spending time with me see you guys this is the little guy who was singing so here's the little guy just hanging out you're cool man i ain't gonna hurt you [Music] you

Channel: Canadian Permaculture Legacy

Views: 228,956

Keywords:

Id: LO-ostC1q-4

Length: 52min 58sec (3178 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 23 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/pperpper]

If someone thinks soil microbiology is boring then they’re certainly very boring.

[u/Suuperdad]

Thanks for watching for anyone who checks this out. Some background on this video...

So much of this information seems like it's "book info" and not useful in the garden, but it's simply not true. If a soil test came back high in nitrates but low in ammonium, what fundamental things would that tell you about your soil? After watching this video you will be able to answer that question with ease, and then take specific action to move the system and soil to where it needs to be.

If you want to learn about this stuff but don't want to read hundreds of pages of text books, then this video may be just what you are looking for.

Happy Gardening everyone

[u/AetherDjinn]

Wow, this is almost an hour long. Want to watch now, but no time. Emailing the link to watch later.

[u/LittleJackalope]

This was such an awesome video! Thank you so much for taking the time to share your knowledge. Cowboy dog and frog interruptions were welcome breaks, but the info was truly invaluable. I’ve been working on my food forest for about 2 years now and every day I’m still learning more, thanks to fellow plant geeks like you :) Looking forward to more content from you!

[u/[deleted]]

Thank you for this video. I find myself feeling good about my livestock knowledge but kindof uneducated in crops and gardening. This was helpful for me.

[u/mainlymicrobes]

Great video. Curious your thoughts on anaerobic ferments like fermented plant juice as foliar or soil amendments? Do you consider them harmful to existing biology?