Teaming with Microbes: The Organic Gardener's Guide to the Soil Food Web

Description

Healthy soil teems with life-not just earthworms and insects, but a staggering multitude of bacteria, fungi, and other microorganisms. Chemical fertilizers injure the microbial life that sustains healthy plants, and the soil becomes increasingly dependent on artificial, often toxic, substances. But there is an alternative: by strengthening the soil food web-the complex world of soil-dwelling organisms-gardeners can create a nurturing environment for plants. Teaming with Microbes extols the benefits of cultivating the soil food web. It clearly explains the activities and organisms that make up the web, and explains how gardeners can cultivate the life of the soil through the use of compost, mulches, and compost tea. With Jeff Lowenfels' help, everyone-from devotees of organic gardening techniques to weekend gardeners who simply want to grow healthy, vigorous plants-can create rich, nurturing, living soil.

Jeff Lowenfels is the Cal Ripkin of garden columnists. His weekly column has run in the Anchorage Daily News for over 27 years, never missing a single week. Jeff also hosts a weekly garden radio show. He hosted Alaska public television's most popular show, Alaska Gardens with Jeff Lowenfels. The show was so popular, at one point it ran four times a week. Jeff grew up working on his father's farm in Scarsdale, New York. He helped plant, weed, and mow, and picked fruits, flowers, and vegetables on eight acres of gardens, orchards, and beds. For the last 30 years, Jeff has lived in Anchorage, Alaska, where he has been able to translate his work-filled childhood into a meaningful and enjoyable hobby, founding Plant A Row for The Hungry, an active program that created over 14 million meals to feed the hungry in 2005. A popular national garden writer and leading proponent of gardening using the concepts of the soil food web, Jeff is the former president of the Garden Writers of America and was made a GWA Fellow in 1999. In 2005, he was inducted into the GWA Hall of Fame, the highest honor a garden writer can achieve. Jeff teaches home gardeners about the soil food web with a painless and extremely entertaining method. After just one hour, his audiences know how to return beneficial biology to their soils and why it is necessary to do so.

"A breakthrough book. . . . well worth owning and reading. No comprehensive horticultural library should be without it." --American Gardener "Digs into soil in a most enlightening and entertaining way." --Dallas Morning News "Required reading for all serious gardeners." --Miami Herald "The authors have given gardeners an inside scoop on the scientific research supporting organic gardening." --Pacific Horticulture "This intense little book may well change the way you garden." --St. Louis Post-Dispatch "Exceptional. . . . A brief, clear overview of scientific information with which every gardener should be familiar." --Monterey Herald "Sure, it's a gardening book, but it has all the drama and suspense of an extraterrestrial thriller. A cast of characters without eyeballs or backbones. Battle scenes with bizarre creatures devouring one another. Only this book is about as terrestrial as it gets." --Anchorage Daily News "All good gardeners know healthy plants start with healthy soil. But why? And how? In Teaming with Microbes Lowenfels and Lewis reveal the new research in the most practical and accessible way." --The Oregonian "Read this book and you'll never think of soil the same way." --Seattle Post-Intelligencer "Sure, it's a gardening book, but it has all the drama and suspense of an extraterrestrial thriller. . . . Read this book and you'll never look at soil the same way." --BB Magazine "A must read for any gardener looking to create a sustainable, healthy garden without chemicals." --Virginian-Pilot "It takes readers underground to meet the critters that live if you let them under the garden." --Rockland Courier-Gazette "[Teaming with Microbes] was one of those 'aha' moments for me, where I realized I had been growing wrong this whole time." --Matthew Frigon (Founder of Lazy Bee Farms) in Dope Magazine