Soil Ruminations

I find myself thinking more and more about soil as an actual organism, rather than just something that plants happen to grow out of. Our appreciation of both the intricate relationships between the separate organisms within the soil, and their sheer numbers and diversity grows each day. here's a nice example of soil life, lifted from
http://web.ukonline.co.uk/fred.moor/soil/formed/f0105.htm

Soil Inhabitants

"Bacteria
As well as plants, other life arose in the soil. Some of it is more fascinating that the world we see each day. In one tablespoonful of soil, there are more bacteria than there are people on the entire planet. A quarter of a million of them could sit on the full stop at the end of this sentence. They can live in air, water, extremes of heat and cold, and are able to function without sunlight. There are bacteria that can take animal excrement and purify it. Others can take nitrogen from the air in the soil and convert it into nitrates that are needed by higher plants for growth. Being contained within a single cell, they cannot eat solids, but feed by secreting enzymes to dissolve their surroundings to a form which they can digest, then re-absorb as lunch.

Another of the most impressive things about bacteria is the range of material they can break down to digest. Carbon compounds like naphthalene present them with no problem, something we as humans find difficult to do unless we have a laboratory.

Fungi
Essential to the breakdown of woody organic matter, fungi are another mystery in the soil, Some are parasites on live or dead plants, others live in harmony with plant roots, helping to create the ideal conditions for both to flourish.

Algae
Like plants, but more simple in composition, algae can take up carbon dioxide from the surface air (although a few do it deep in the soil) and convert it to oxygen as part of their food production process. We, of course, are happy with this, because oxygen is replenished by such means and we get to live.

Microscopic Animals
From simple celled amoeba and protozoa running their lives in the soil moisture, through nematodes that can damage the roots of the plants we want to grow, your soil is teeming with unseen life all of which plays its part in the complex chain of interdependency that is life.

Other Creatures
The most obvious are earthworms. The gardener’s friend, they play a huge part in mixing organic matter from the surface into the lower depths of the soil, and in doing so, they provide the source of food for countless numbers of other organisms who feed on the organic matter. Their burrowing also leaves (by comparison) huge aeration channels and fissures in the soil, along which air can diffuse and water drain. It is estimated that there are somewhere between 200 and 600 worms in every square metre of your garden.

Then there are the beetles that assist in clearing up the decaying organic matter, and who themselves provide food for small animals all the way up the food chain to man.

So, as we have seen, soil is a hugely complicated microscopic world, teeming with interdependent life chains."

Now would be a good time to have a national reading of Rachel Carson's Silent Spring. Not only to marvel at her prescience and courage, but as a wake-up call. From the chapter, The Obligation To Endure:

"Future historians may well be amazed by our distorted sense of proportion. How could intelligent beings seek to control a few unwanted species by a method that contaminated the entire environment and brought the threat of disease and death even to their own kind? Yet this is precisely what we have done. We have done it, moreover, for reasons that collapse the moment we examine them."

Time to get outside and fluff up the compost heap again...got it re-invigorated yesterday...stirred in more leaves that were shredded in the Fall, turned in the kitchen scraps that had accumulated on the heap...folded it all in with the worms and microbes from the bottom of the pile. It'll heat up nicley in a few days...yea, Spring !