Actually, soil.
The way I describe it to people is helped by imagining a petri dish in three dimensions. The material I specialize in, char, has fourteen acres of surface area per handful, so that's a lot of petri dishes! My goal, as soil builder is to get the right mix of "ingredients" that will provide soil microbes everything they need to be healthy. Imagine, coating fourteen acres of petri dish with agar. This is nearly, but not quite my goal. Let me explain why.
First, let me back up and explain a relationship that mirrors the soil interactions, once you "get it", the relationship in the soil microbial food web becomes much more clear. This will give better insight into the biological reality that soil builders confront that wannabes never do. I have friends who raise bees. Several remain tied to a specific location and some palletize their bees and drive them on flatbeds, thousands of miles throughout the year, traveling during overnight hours while the bees are hived up, charging farmers for their pollination services. These two ways of raising the critters differ greatly. There is also a difference between other cultural aspects of bee-keeping. Some harvest honey in Fall or Early Winter, when the hive closes down for the year and these beekeepers feed sugar water through the winter moons to keep their bees alive until Spring. This approach, to me, seems like living on high-fructose corn syrup. I can tell you that the two people who have had hives swarm twice in a single summer were the resident kind, and also, they don't "harvest" honey until they see the bees carrying back pollen to the hive in Spring.
I'm not saying so to be some sort of heretic, but ask yourself, if you had to live on a winter ration (imagine, if you could make it on just that) of either sugar water or honey...which would you rather?
So, back to soil. When you grow in agar, you are just trying to get a single generation, that you can positively id, not necessarily build a three dimensional colony, as you would be doing in composting/soil building. You can get soil microbes to reproduce more, by keeping them warm, keeping them moderately moist, and aerated, feeding more of what they want into the area you want them to colonize and by stirring the reproducing microbes through the char, frequently making sure the growing colonies have territory to colonize. Typically, I will add a natural high nitrogen fertilizer (chicken manure, manure of any type really, worm castings, urine, green grass clippings, etc.) into the char initially, with moisture, this process of adding this vital macronutrient with water is like the agar, but with minerals, biofilms, and a variety of organic "food" for the great colony of soil microbes I intend to "culture". Water, essential to all life is best when pure and live, compost tea, aerated or stirred (like biodynamic preparations) work best. Also, rock dusts added during the initial moisturization of the char will be partially drawn into the preserved cellular structure of the organic material from which the char was made. This becomes food for organisms as the material matures.
Two possibilities exist, and there are good reasons for both. When adding rock dusts, there is benefit to utilizing parent material from your geologically distinct bedrock. This way, you assure that at least some of what microbes find will be familiar. However, imported rock dusts can be used to ameliorate extremes when soils are either too acidic or too alkaline. If soils are generally too acid, use rock dusts from calciferous stone, limestone, dolomite, etc. these buffer the acidity somewhat. Soils that are overly alkaline benefit from a variety of granitic powders, many of which lead to increased acidity in soil. In either case, I like to include a small amount of parent material from the local soils as well.I try to include both and really focus a lot of my own energy on balancing the food web of organisms in the char to be healthiest just as they are released into garden beds.
Every square foot of soil that I have treated with char has doubled production from that soil. Most of my test beds have continued to improve production even after years of the soil being treated! When building soil as I do, you definitely don't want to till too deeply. Soil, because it is filled with living organisms, needs to stay arable. I recently heard someone describe the concept of living soil very well. They said it breathes. When there is Low pressure, the soils exhale, when there is high pressure, the soil inhales. Simple but effective way to understand the billions of organisms per tablespoon found in healthy soil. Unhealthy soil has far less life and often has links missing in the endemic soil food web. Soil talks to those of us who hear it. Understanding the language of soil requires sensitivity to what goes on there. The realms of life residing in the top few inches of soil, those you can only see with a microscope could weight more than a cow and her calf in each acre of soil. Hundreds of billions of organisms could live in a handful of char, how we make and use biochar can allow us to create soil at unprecedented rates. Such a tiny fraction of the planet produces food, it is definitely withing our power to enrich all of it!
The way I describe it to people is helped by imagining a petri dish in three dimensions. The material I specialize in, char, has fourteen acres of surface area per handful, so that's a lot of petri dishes! My goal, as soil builder is to get the right mix of "ingredients" that will provide soil microbes everything they need to be healthy. Imagine, coating fourteen acres of petri dish with agar. This is nearly, but not quite my goal. Let me explain why.
First, let me back up and explain a relationship that mirrors the soil interactions, once you "get it", the relationship in the soil microbial food web becomes much more clear. This will give better insight into the biological reality that soil builders confront that wannabes never do. I have friends who raise bees. Several remain tied to a specific location and some palletize their bees and drive them on flatbeds, thousands of miles throughout the year, traveling during overnight hours while the bees are hived up, charging farmers for their pollination services. These two ways of raising the critters differ greatly. There is also a difference between other cultural aspects of bee-keeping. Some harvest honey in Fall or Early Winter, when the hive closes down for the year and these beekeepers feed sugar water through the winter moons to keep their bees alive until Spring. This approach, to me, seems like living on high-fructose corn syrup. I can tell you that the two people who have had hives swarm twice in a single summer were the resident kind, and also, they don't "harvest" honey until they see the bees carrying back pollen to the hive in Spring.
I'm not saying so to be some sort of heretic, but ask yourself, if you had to live on a winter ration (imagine, if you could make it on just that) of either sugar water or honey...which would you rather?
So, back to soil. When you grow in agar, you are just trying to get a single generation, that you can positively id, not necessarily build a three dimensional colony, as you would be doing in composting/soil building. You can get soil microbes to reproduce more, by keeping them warm, keeping them moderately moist, and aerated, feeding more of what they want into the area you want them to colonize and by stirring the reproducing microbes through the char, frequently making sure the growing colonies have territory to colonize. Typically, I will add a natural high nitrogen fertilizer (chicken manure, manure of any type really, worm castings, urine, green grass clippings, etc.) into the char initially, with moisture, this process of adding this vital macronutrient with water is like the agar, but with minerals, biofilms, and a variety of organic "food" for the great colony of soil microbes I intend to "culture". Water, essential to all life is best when pure and live, compost tea, aerated or stirred (like biodynamic preparations) work best. Also, rock dusts added during the initial moisturization of the char will be partially drawn into the preserved cellular structure of the organic material from which the char was made. This becomes food for organisms as the material matures.
Two possibilities exist, and there are good reasons for both. When adding rock dusts, there is benefit to utilizing parent material from your geologically distinct bedrock. This way, you assure that at least some of what microbes find will be familiar. However, imported rock dusts can be used to ameliorate extremes when soils are either too acidic or too alkaline. If soils are generally too acid, use rock dusts from calciferous stone, limestone, dolomite, etc. these buffer the acidity somewhat. Soils that are overly alkaline benefit from a variety of granitic powders, many of which lead to increased acidity in soil. In either case, I like to include a small amount of parent material from the local soils as well.I try to include both and really focus a lot of my own energy on balancing the food web of organisms in the char to be healthiest just as they are released into garden beds.
Every square foot of soil that I have treated with char has doubled production from that soil. Most of my test beds have continued to improve production even after years of the soil being treated! When building soil as I do, you definitely don't want to till too deeply. Soil, because it is filled with living organisms, needs to stay arable. I recently heard someone describe the concept of living soil very well. They said it breathes. When there is Low pressure, the soils exhale, when there is high pressure, the soil inhales. Simple but effective way to understand the billions of organisms per tablespoon found in healthy soil. Unhealthy soil has far less life and often has links missing in the endemic soil food web. Soil talks to those of us who hear it. Understanding the language of soil requires sensitivity to what goes on there. The realms of life residing in the top few inches of soil, those you can only see with a microscope could weight more than a cow and her calf in each acre of soil. Hundreds of billions of organisms could live in a handful of char, how we make and use biochar can allow us to create soil at unprecedented rates. Such a tiny fraction of the planet produces food, it is definitely withing our power to enrich all of it!
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