What's living in your soil?
If
you raked back the leaves and carefully weighed out all of the life in
a forest's soil, the sheer quantity would astound you. The soil
invertebrates would add up to the equivalent mass of four to thirteen
sheep per acre. In a coniferous forest, where fungi are king, the
threads of fungi in a single teaspoon of soil would unspool to stretch
forty miles. Tickle out the tiny bacteria and they'd add up to a
few tons per acre as well.
That said, the volume of
soil microorganisms doesn't hold a candle to their essential
functions. This week's lunchtime series is based on Dave Jacke's
Edible
Forest Gardens volume 1. I didn't have room to present all
of the rivetting information there, so if you're intrigued by this
teaser, I highly recommend checking his book out and flipping straight
to chapter 5.
| This post is part of our Living Soil lunchtime series.
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About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.
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