As someone who has gardened organically for decades, operated a garden design business, is a master gardener volunteer and is quite well-read in gardening books, I’m amazed and delighted to encounter the research in this little book "A Soil Owner’s Manual: How to Restore and Maintain Soul Health" by Jon Stika.
Stika calls the need to nurture soil micro-organisms as a paradigm shift in what he calls the soil food web. He discusses how tilling soil degrades it because “it takes time and energy for the plant to establish the necessary relationships with the desired soil organisms. . .” He recommends managing soil as a biologic rather than chemical system by feeding microbes rather than plants, pointing out that there are more microbes in a handful of soil than there are humans on earth.
I totally forgive him for saying “tenant of ecology” rather than tenet.
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