The Soil Web – Life in the Dirt with Jeff Lowenfels

It’s
Alive! Jeff Lowenfels on the Web – the Soil Food Web

You’ve
heard that soil is alive. What does that mean?

On
this week’s show Jeff Lowenfels talks about billions of organisms that live in
healthy soil (microscopic examples, below). In Teaming with Microbes: The Organic Gardener’s Guide to the
Soil Food Web,
Lowenfels and co-author Wayne Lewis explain that the food chain of organisms is
not one straight line with humans at the top – if anything, plants are at the top
— and it is not a straight line, but multiple overlapping lines forming a kind
of web.

After introducing many different types of life in the earth, the authors
present a review of some concepts to help us organic gardeners fine tune our
soil. Did you know: some plants prefer soils dominated by bacteria, others by
fungi; compost teas can be customized to be fungal, bacterial, or a balance of
both by choosing what they are made from; most trees, shrubs and perennials
prefer nitrogen in ammonium form; most vegetables, annuals and grasses prefer
their nitrogen in nitrate form? These are just a few of the revealing facts in
this new edition of Teaming with Microbes.

Click on the small black arrow at the left on the bar below to start
listening,

or click on the MP3 link to download the show into Windows
Media Player or iTunes:

MP3 File