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| A snapshot of the community permaculture garden, June 2024. We garden in a way that promotes the oft-mentioned soil microbes, but why? |
One of the things we try to do in our garden is build a healthy network of soil microbes. But why do we care about these soil microbes?
Well, healthy soil is soil with lots of diverse microbes. In short: soil microbes are needed for plants to grow.
The longer explanation is that different species of microbes have different benefits, including:
- Being necessary for plants to absorb essential nutrients.
- Contributing to disease resistance in plants.
- Carbon sequestration: removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and turning it into humus.
- Forming mutually beneficial relationships with plants.
- Specialized soil fungi (called mycorrhizae) provide phosphorus to plants.
- Specialized soil bacteria (called rhizobia) provide nitrogen to plants.
(More on this in our workshop on Clover)
Permaculture often focuses on promoting healthy networks of soil microbes, to great success. In a study comparing two permaculture-managed agricultural sites to a traditionally-managed one, the soil at the permaculture site had x3 the amount of soil microbes.
One of the methods that those permaculture sites used that we also employ in our garden is the no-till method, which we discussed in our Sunday Teachable workshop this past weekend. You can also read about this in our next blog post.
Sources:
French E, Kaplan I, Iyer-Pascuzzi A, Nakatsu CH, Enders L. 2021. Emerging strategies for precision microbiome management in diverse agroecosystems. Nature Plants. 7(3):256–267. doi:https://doi.org/10.1038/s41477-020-00830-9.
Joos L, De Tender C. 2022. Soil under stress: The importance of soil life and how it is influenced by (micro)plastic pollution. Computational and Structural Biotechnology Journal. 20:1554–1566. doi:https://doi.org/10.1016/j.csbj.2022.03.041. [accessed 2024 Aug 1]. https://www.csbj.org/article/S2001-0370(22)00116-7/fulltext.
Williamson RF, Reay M, Sgouridis F. 2024. Permaculture Management of Arable Soil Increases Soil Microbial Abundance, Nutrients, and Carbon Stocks Compared to Conventional Agriculture. Agronomy. 14(7):1446. doi:https://doi.org/10.3390/agronomy14071446. [accessed 2024 Aug 1]. https://www.mdpi.com/2073-4395/14/7/1446.