Book.."Teaming With Microbes A Gardener's Guide... "

[NATHAN MAYO]

Has anyone out there besides me read this book yet? It contains lots of info about the types of critters living down under and how they interact with each other and the plants above. I think ALL newbies like me should read it to understand how the soil foodweb works, and even some of you more experienced guys might learn something. I get the idea from reading some of the posts that you are going more on gut feel than science, but I could be wrong. If anyone has a comment about it, let me know if it helped you. This organic stuff is a whole new world for me...........nm

[andy10917]

I have. It is excellent - good for the lawn owner that wants to explore a little deeper, but not trite to the person that knows the chemistry and biology. Warning: you will put your rototiller on Craigslist for $10 before you are halfway done with the book.

[cactus]

Warning: you will put your rototiller on Craigslist for $10 before you are halfway done with the book.

Or try to figure out a way to use it to aerate 55 gallons of Compost Tea without destroying too many fungal hyphae

[andy10917]

Cactus:

It is ridiculous to consider using a rototiller for such a task. Get a 225hp Yamaha outboard motor if you want to do the job right.

[PJD]

I've been eying this one and I think I'm going to have to pull the trigger and buy it. I've got lots of worm castings and I need to start making my own AACT. I sit and think about it before I fall asleep at night...

[eriocaulon]

I certainly find soil microbes interesting, but learning about the finer details really put me to sleep. I so wanted to love this book but ultimately found it too detailed.

[rcnaylor]

Regarding "gut feel" v. "going on science": while I haven't read the book in question, and I have no doubt it could tell me a lot more than I currently know, my general impression is that the science of today has barely scratched the surface on what all those microbes and soil organisms are, and, in particular, how they react to various stimuli and interact among themselves. Yes, we understand some of them in broad strokes, but the numbers involved make running blind scientific test staggeringly complex in the big picture.

For instance, lets take one of 10000 organisms out and see what happens to the soil equation. Or give one of 10,000 more compost tea. Then multiply the number of possible permutations of that experiment.

And, I doubt we have even discovered all the different players and sub-players yet.

And, the problem is, who is funding these kinds of test? Not a big enough profit motive to get any big corporations too busy in the area as far as I can see.

Some day we might obtain huge value (be able to grow things in salty ground or deserts, etc with the right combination of microbes and organisms and additives) if we just knew enough of the info.

We've barely scratched the surface scientifically... pun intended.

[rcnaylor]

Here's a little blurb from surfing that talks about the problem we have so far:

For example, a single gram of soil may contain millions of individual and several thousand species of bacteria (Torsvik et al., 1994).

Soil biota includes bacteria, fungi, protozoa, nematodes, mites (acari), collembolans (springtails), annelids (enchytraeids and earthworms) and macroarthropods (insects, woodlice) (Fig. 1). It also includes plant roots and their exudates attract a variety of organisms which either feed directly on these secretions or graze on the microorganisms concentrated near the roots, giving this busy environment the name of rhizosphere. The soil communities are so diverse in both size and numbers of species, yet they are still extremely poorly understood and in dire need of further assessment. Research has been limited by their immense diversity, their small size and by technical problems.

Although some estimates on their density are available for those animal groups which have been more intensively studied, they are still preliminary and very likely to be much lower than the estimated total number of species for any particular group. For example, the described number of soil dwelling fungal species is estimated to be at least 74,000, while the projected number is over 1.5 million (Hawksworth, 2001). Other organisms expected to be much more species-rich are nematodes and mites, with perhaps only 3 and 5%, respectively, of the total species presently described (Walter and Proctor, 1999; Hawksworth and Mound, 1991). The estimates for bacteria and archea species are particularly problematic because of the differences in opinion as to what criteria should be used to define a species, and the present unculturability of many of these organisms (Hawksworth and Kalin-Arroyo, 1995).

[andy10917]

There is a lot more stuff available out there on the Internet worth reading, and way more than you'd imagine is very old observations that have become "lost" over time. Empirical data is very valuable.

David had me read an article written in Russian from the year 1900 (thank God for Google translator) that got into ammonia deposition from compost piles in dew. It was amazing the learnings that come from pre-synthetic days that have finally been authenticated by scientific measurement. It is also interesting to query Google with specific terms that come from your own observations instead of just reading Page 1 of Google results with general terms - I have had MANY an observation confirmed when I did that.

[Dchall_San_Antonio]

The author of Teaming With Microbes is highly regarded in the compost tea forums.