Teaming with Microbes: A Gardener’s Guide to the Soil Food Web

Jeff Lowenfels and Wayne Lewis. Portland: Timber Press, 2006. 196 pages.

If you are a gardener who isn’t afraid of some food for thought, read Teaming with Microbes: A Gardener’s Guide to the Soil Food Web.

It has an interesting premise, and does a nice job of supporting it: To reduce the amount of work and resources that you have to add and remove from the system, make better use of naturally occurring processes.

In a natural setting such as a forest or jungle, plants can thrive without any human intervention. There is a web of dependencies and products that allow resources to be acquired, used, and then made available again in some form to something further down the line. Plants need fertilizer, and if you follow the chain of events, they eventually become fertilizer with help from other parts of the web.

Conventional farming and gardening methods, on the other hand, attempt to restrict this web to the bare minimum required to produce the product that we want (fruits, vegetables, feed, etc.).

Now as any indoor gardener can tell you, the further you get away from a plant’s natural environment, the more responsible you become for supplying the needs that were being filled by other members of the web. For example, if you take a plant away from the sun, you become responsible for supplying light. If you remove the natural sources of nutrients, you become responsible for supplying the plants with nutrients, and so on.

In order to help explain what these naturally occurring factors are, the first part of the book describes the web from dirt and bacteria up to animal life. For material that contains a lot of Latin words, it is very straightforward and easy to understand. Much more the way textbooks should be written, instead of how they are. I have a feeling that I will be using it as a reference many times as I follow my own gardening path.

Once the Soil Food Web has been described, and the reader encouraged to take a more holistic, synergistic view of their garden, the second part of the book explains some ways to apply this knowledge. Instead of trying to force your garden to perform, you nurture and nudge it in the direction you want using compost, mulch, compost teas and so on. Like training an animal to perform tricks, you encourage your garden to do what you want, and discourage it from doing what you don’t.

To help readers distill the knowledge in the book down to a more manageable level for quick reference, there is a list of “The Soil Food Web Gardening Rules” which are nineteen statements that are the essence of some of the most important concepts in what the book has to say. It also has my only complaint about in the book: I would have liked a reference from the list of rules, to the relevant sections in the book.

It is the best book on garden interdependencies that I have read. Even though the topics discussed have given me a lot to think about, and the possible ramifications will have me referring back to it on a regular basis, the writing is so straightforward and smooth, that it has an almost “quick read” property to it. I finished it in two evenings.

If you want to consider yourself a “well read” gardener, put this on your list.

Peace, love and puka shells,

Grubbycup