Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
Chapter 2
The Soil Dwellery
The “soil food web” refers to the inhabitants of the soil village. They are an army of tire-
less workers — 20,000 to 30,000 different species of organisms found in a teaspoon of
healthy soil. We call it a web to focus on not only the different creatures living in and on
the soil, but — more importantly — on how they relate and interact with each other. If you
cut one silk strand out of a spider web, the whole web is affected. Each strand is necessary,
and each member of the soil food web has a role to play, too.
While a few of us might enjoy getting to know what they look like, how they eat and
how they move, more important to us as gardeners are the miraculous ways their interac-
tions influence our garden, and what we need to do to encourage the interactions that sup-
port healthy plants.
We've looked at plants, and now I will briefly introduce the five other kingdoms of life
in this chapter — bacteria, archaea, fungi, protists and animals — and my focus will be as
much on what they do as on what they look like. You may wonder why it's so important to
learn about all of these guys when you're reading a topic about gardening. They're as im-
portant to the garden as the sand, silt, clay, fertilizer, water and everything else. They make
the soil and maintain it. They build villages and delegate tasks based on their individual
strengths.
Many are extremely small, but despite their size they rule the world — and they rule our
gardens. They transform the minerals and organic matter in the soil into something that can
support an abundance of life. Many nutrients won't be taken up by plants until microorgan-
isms have converted them to the right form. Some of them pull nitrogen out of the air and
change it into a form that they, and plants, can use. Some bring nutrients directly to plants
in exchange for food from those same plants.
Without a vast array of soil food web players, we wouldn't have soil. They also work to
protect plants from plant-feeding predators, both in the soil and above ground. Some of
them eat dead things and some of them eat living things and eventually they die them-
selves. All of this contributes to the organic matter and mineral content of our world. Yes, a
few of them also eat plants, but the vast majority are friends of plants — just like the vast
majority of bacteria in our body are our friends.
