"One of my friends runs an organic golf course which is beautiful. He had the soil tested and found that it was deficient in every nutrient. He then had plant tissue samples tested and they had the perfect amounts of every nutrient in them. The soil test only looks for soluble plant nutrients, but beneficial microbes make insoluble nutrients available to plants."Source: Ed Updike at the Organic Growers School this past weekend.
If you feed your plants soluble fertilizer, 1/3 to 2/3 of it is going to leach away to become water pollution instead of plant food. But if you build the beneficial microbial populations in the soil, they make the insoluble minerals already in the soil available to the plants they surround.
At one end of the spectrum are orchids like Lady Slippers which have no root hairs (blueberries don't have root hairs either). Instead they have a myco-heterotrophic relationship with a fungus that can feed the hairless roots. Like other orchids, the seeds of the Lady Slipper remain dormant until they come in contact with the specific fungus they require to grow. This weekend I learned that more than 80% of plants have known relationships with soil organisms that affect how they derive nutrients from the soil. Sadly, I missed the class on Mycorrhiza because I think that would have tied everything together nicely.
How to build the microbial population in the soil? My organic gardening neighbor would say, "organic matter, organic matter, organic matter." If you can't get enough (and few can), you can "brew tea" by putting a bag of premium worm castings in water with a little unsulphured molasses and bubble air through it until the bacterial and fungal population has reached maximum size (18-48 hours depending on how efficient your apparatus and proportions are). The activated beneficial organism tea can then be sprayed over crops or diluted (up to 50/1) and watered into the soil. The less biologically active your soil is, the better it works. And it really works - Jafasa Farms looked beautiful!
