For our first post we wanted to briefly talk about living soil. What makes it effective and what’s in it .

For many, living soil might seem like a new way of growing, but its far from it. It’s how a lot of plants have been grown since their existence. Living soil is the natural cycle of growing plants and with-it growers are returning the incredible quality of nutrients, taste, and medicine to their plants. Living soil focuses not completely of what to feed the plants, but what to feed the soil. You want to build a healthy population of bacteria and fungi in your soil. These are the workers, converting chemicals to nutrients for the plants to uptake.

What is bacteria

Bacteria are microorganism, and they are very essential to life. They are present in most habitats including yourself. For plants and soil health we want to focus more on our aerobic bacteria. Aerobic bacteria are simply oxygen loving bacteria one way to tell if your soil is aerobic is by smelling it. If it gives off a nice earth smell then it’s in great shape, but if you are getting a sour sewer smell then it is most likely anaerobic which is going to need some corrections to help your plants. Bacteria are very fast at reproducing; they can double population in 15 – 30 minutes in favorable conditions. This makes it incredibly easy for soils to become bacterial dominate. Which is perfect if you are only growing grasses and like tilling often. But for many plants we want to build a healthy population of fungi in the soil.

What is fungi

The best way we have heard fungi explained is by Dr. Elaine Ingham who said, “Fungi are microscopic cells that usually grow as long threads or strands called hyphae, which push their way between soil particles, roots, and rocks.” These hyphae are incredible and when they group together, they form mycelium. Typically, when talking about soil fungi you will hear people talk about mycorrhizal fungi. This is a specific group of fungi known for mutualism with plants. Mycorrhiza means fungus root and these fugus roots will grow into the plant’s roots. When they do this, they expand the nutrient uptake zone for plants. Fungi are amazing at nutrient cycling, disease suppression, and water dynamics. When it comes to your soil, fungi are vital. In fact, in a plant like cannabis its been shown that they do better in a fungal dominate soil rather than bacterial dominate soil. A couple steps to get your soil fungal dominate are keeping it in a hospitable environment for the plants, do not till unless necessary, and reduce usage of fungicide. Fungal dominate soils get better with age it can take a couple years before your soil is at peak performance .

Worms

Worms deserve a post of their own with the amount of work they do. For now, we’ll keep them short in this. Worms are vital to living soil because they will till the soil for you keeping it from going hydrophobic. Of course, when they are doing so its at an incredibly small scale and they are leaving a nutrient rich casting behind them. They’re also vital on the top layer of your soil, they will help degrade the dead leaves from your plants and cover crop.

Cover cropping

Cover cropping is another vital part to living soil. You can apply a mulch layer, but a cover crop brings a lot of benefits. The main key takeaway from it is to make sure your top layer of soil isn’t bare. A bare soil will be susceptible to light which will cause some sterilization and possibly erosion. A cover crop can help prevent this as well as help with certain nutrient fixations like nitrogen. There are tons of different cover crops and we will have them be a post of their own in the future. A very popular one in the cannabis industry has been clover. Clover has a lot of benefits to it, but has gotten a bad wrap from some growers due to it attracting some pests, so be weary of that.

What’s in living soil

Now that we have gone over some of the basics of living soil lets talk about what’s in it. There are tons of different recipes and ours will be released for sale soon but generally a living soil recipe will consist of:

30 – 50% Peat Moss or Coco Coir

20 – 30% high-grade compost or worm casting

20 – 30% aeration this can consist of Pumice, Rice Hulls or even Perlite

We like to add 5 – 10% Biochar in ours

After these main ingredients you will add per cubic foot:

2 cups Rock Dust

1 cup Gypsum

½ cup Neem or Karanja cake

½ sup Crustacean meal

½ cup of Alfalfa or Kelp

1 cup Oyster Shell Flour

Will be going over why each of these ingredients are important in future posts, but for now this a general mix that will get you off to the right start.

We are going to be adding several more posts about living soil since there is so much material we didn’t even get to. Of everything we discussed if you were to remember anything about living soil it should be that the whole concept is just trying to mimic the natural practices that mother nature has been doing since our existence. Mother nature knows what is best and we need to follow her if we want to grow the absolute best plants for our nutrition. Feel free to leave a comment if there is a certain topic you want covered in more description. Thanks for reading!