Jeff Lowenfels from The Teaming Series on Organic Growing and Soil Health

GN: Hello, everyone. It’s Steve Melito from Go Natural Education and today we are here with Jeff Lowenfels, who is the author of several award-winning books on plants and soil. He’s also the longest running garden columnist in North America. Jeff, welcome to the podcast

JL: Well, thanks for having me. You know it’s a real honor.

GN: You’ve written so many books. Where should somebody start if they want to learn about soil?

JL: Well, obviously, from my perspective the place to start is my first book, which I wrote with my business partner, Wayne Lewis. It’s basically Dr. Elaine Ingham’s soil food web system. It’s Teaming with Microbes and it gives you the basics. Now, this was 2006 and the soil food web back then was a beautiful system that very few people had ever heard of, and now it’s been adapted and adopted as really the system.

There have been two big additions. One is mycorrhizal fungi. They were really not commercially available and people weren’t really pushing them and studying them very hard, and so second book was written, Teaming with Fungi, which really encompasses the addition of mycorrhizal fungi to Dr. Elaine’s basic system. Then we had, which was discovered in Australia, which is why people pronounce it in a different way I think, but here in America we say rhizophagy, and this is a system that was going on back in the day but nobody could see it and Dr. James White and a group of students at Rutgers University really developed the concept of rhizophagy, which is another addition to Dr Elaine’s soil food web basic program.

Under that system, bacteria that are attractive and that normally would be eaten and pooped-out get lulled into going inside the root system. They can provide up to 40 percent of the nitrogen that a plant needs and then they’re expelled through root hairs which turned out to be the real function of root hairs, and they regrow all their stuff and nutrify themselves back and go back in again and repeat the process.

So the soil food web has changed quite a bit, but it’s really still basically the same system. The plant is in control. It puts out these wonderful exudates that it makes itself using photosynthetic energy and all the nutrients that have been taken into the plant, which incidentally is how that happens, is covered in the fourth book, Teaming with Nutrients, so it’s a nice package series. The whole system is just spectacular. These exudates come out and are specifically designed by the plant to do specific things to attract specific bacteria or fungi and it’s just a beautiful system.

The bacteria and fungi are basically eaten other than these rhizophagy and mycorrhizal fungi and the excess from this eating and they’re eaten by protozoa, which everybody studied in high school; amoebas, which nobody ever saw but they always told the professor they did; and parameciums, which were kind of cool. You should Google what they look like today. They’re spectacularly beautiful creatures, which they were not necessarily when we were doing diagrams of them as kids in high school but in any case they eat the bacteria and fungi and poop-out the excess and it’s in plant-usable form and has the right charge on it. It goes into the plant and it feeds the plant and does whatever the plant needs it to do what an unbelievable system. It’s just incredible

GN: I noticed you used the word poop and I’m going to use it too because at Go Natural Education, we do a lot of education about, frankly, the importance of cattle and cows and manure, it ain’t all that bad. What’s it not, however, are chemical fertilizers. Can you talk about what we’re doing to the soil?

JL: One of the great things about the soil food web system is that it creates soil structure and it does so because the bacteria produce a slime, that’s the same slime you have on your teeth when you wake up in the morning, and it’s produced by bacteria. You can’t just wash it off. You have to brush it off and so that bacteria slime is very sticky and it sticks all these particles of soil together.

They’re not bricks so they’re not flat. There are air space. There’s pores and so they are then woven together by fungal hyphae and you get these aggregates of soil that that have hiding spaces for the little guys that have spaces for air and water retention. This is soil structure. If you don’t have soil structure then it doesn’t matter what you do to your soil. It’s just not going to grow plants well.

When you start using chemicals, you change the microbiology in the system of these microbes. You kill some of these microbes. You change the balance but ultimately what happens is you destroy soil structure, particularly when you throw in rototilling and trying to inject this stuff down into the root system is it so you end up destroying this system. And it obviously doesn’t operate properly. You have to continually pump in these chemicals so that you get enough into the plant to enable to grow as opposed to the natural system, where a plant can take what it needs from these microbes. The microbodies hold the nutrients in them in a chemical system when there’s no soil structure and no microbes. The nutrients go down into our water system and so it’s just night and day. It makes tremendous sense it’s just a question of getting people to implement it.

GN: Sure. Talk to me more about rototilling. For years I’d go out every spring. I’d throw a weed and feed on my lawn before I knew better and began beekepping. ‘d also go in my garden and rototill. So does rototilling destroy the microbes, or it’s is it the structure – or both.

JL: It used to be my favorite thing to do as well. It’s my first memory of my father, sitting in a wheelbarrow while he used this monstrous rototiller: big Troy-Bilt rototiller biggest thing I ever saw.

What happens is first of all, the soil structure we just talked about, gets pulverized up. The bacteria that are supposed to be down in the zone get thrown up in a different zone, so they’re not where they’re supposed to be. The worms get cut in half. Well, that doesn’t produce two extra worms. That’s, you know, a dead worm. So there’s all sorts of just bad things that happen to the soil food web that destroy the soil structure and destroy the ability of the microbes to properly feed your stuff.

Then you have the fungal network, which is throughout the garden and you’re breaking that up so that it takes a while to come back again. Everything just gets completely thrown out of balance. Now, when you walk in a city, New York City for example, you look down at the sidewalk and there’s grass growing right through the cement. They don’t need our rototilling. If you want to disturb the soil and help the plant, make a teeny weeny little disturbance. Take a two by four and run it down a row use a drill where you put in the shovel or something. You don’t have to destroy the entire yard in order to plant something, and Ithink people just have to get away from it. It’s an old habit. It dies hard. These used to be the sponsors of all of the horticultural magazines that we grew up with and it’s too bad. It’s just not something you should be doing anymore.

GN: What do you think about genetically modified organisms in the soil? Is there a relationship or are they just two completely separate things.

JL: You know, there probably is a relationship. I’m not sure I’m smart enough to understand it. Fortunately, the seeds that we plant are all basically organic. Some of them may have a coating but when you buy seeds, you’re buying it. I read a lot of science and there’s certainly a lot that supports the use of GMO but there’s some that doesn’t. It’s just I’m not smart enough to have the real answer, so I defer. I must say I do I do avoid it. I don’t want GMO corn.

GN: I just read an article that you wrote about soil temperature and it was for a paper in Alaska where I imagine soil temperature is a big deal and you told people to relax about the ambient air temperature in the weather because of what matters is the temperature of the soil for seed germination. Can you talk a little bit about that?

JL: Yeah, well, we have obviously in Anchorage. We worry about our ambient air temperature because we don’t want to have things frozen once they come up but the soil temperature is incredibly important because we have a very short season and so if you don’t time things properly, you can delay the season for yourself or the growing. If you plant a plant before the soil gets warm enough or seed before the soil gets warm enough, it’ll germinate. But it will germinate slower and the development will be slower and your fruiting will be slower and your vegetables come later so you have to be at the right time. You don’t want to waste seeds and so there is a sequence of things that we put in the ground depending on what the soil temperature is, which means, of course, you have to know what the soil temperature is.

Information is power. You need a soil thermometer, sure, and in Anchorage, Alaska it has to go down to at least 40 degrees because that’s the temperature when you put in peas and lettuces and whatnot, even though you could probably put them in a little bit earlier.

GN: Got it. So I read another article recently about the loss of nutritional value and a lot of the fruits and vegetables that people eat. Is there a relationship to soil health with that?

JL: Well, I’m certainly reading the same articles you’re reading and it seems to indicate that what we’re eating today compared to what it was in 1940 is night and day in terms of nutrient density. It’s not good today compared to what it was then so if you’re growing organically, I think if you’re on the track and you’re doing it properly obviously a lot of stuff we buy at the supermarket or is presented at the supermarket is not grown organically, which perhaps one reason why now when you walk into every single supermarket in the United States of America there’s an organic section that there’s a special number for organics. People are demanding organics. And it’s been slow. It started in 1967. Believe it or not, there was that cover of Life Magazine with a woman with organics, you know like “What’s this? It’s amazing. This is amazing stuff .”

GN: Do you worry that people are too far removed from the soil to understand some of the things that you’re trying to teach them?

JL:  No. I’ll tell you why. This is easy stuff and the problem is we might not have the predicates because we spend, as I often mentioned, we spend all of our youths and I mean our little kids time, teaching them about dinosaurs, reading dinosaur books, and teaching them dinosaur words and taking them to museums where they’re using dinosaur you know instead of teaching about microbes that are important. We’re missing the predicates and so my thought is you need to learn it and if you didn’t learn it as a kid you’ll need to learn it now.

There’s a wonderful book out now called Lessons in Chemistry where where a woman turns her cooking television show into lessons in chemistry. it elevates the education of all the people who are watching and if that’s what happens, I hope you know but it’s not that difficult. Word like poop are pretty easy to register exactly.

GN: Have you done any research into the value of manure as a fertilizer at all? We certainly spent a lot of time looking at it and trying to explode some of the myths about manure and cows in general.

JL: Manure is for many people the the ultimate brown in compost. It can be strong stuff. I don’t use manure because I’m a little freaked out about e.coli and antibiotics, and unless you know exactly where your manure is coming from you don’t know what’s in it. You don’t know what the guy’s been eating or gal’s been eating and so it’s one of those things that if you’re going to use manure, put it in the compost pile first. That’s how I approach it. I don’t put manure down on the garden now. You can probably buy commercial manures that are specially labeled and you can understand the label and it says organic it’s organic and so you use it but I’m not a manure fan. Plus, I think it’s got a lot of the middle number which gets locked up in the soil, and you can have too much and so I, yeah, I’m just not a big manure user. If I do get manure, I put it in the compost and the compost hopper.

GN: So tell us about that middle number and those numbers in general for those that don’t know.

JL: Yeah, the NPK numbers which are on every label are nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium and all fertilizer labels have those three numbers now when you buy lawn food these days they don’t have the middle number it’s zero because you’re not allowed to use phosphorus we’re running into a peak phosphorus situation where, you know, 30 40 50 years but when I have any phosphorus so we’re gonna have to figure out different ways to get it and so it’s a waste to put it down when it gets locked up right away. So nitrogen, obviously, eighty percent of what your plant needs is nitrogen. Nitrogen is the key primary nutrient so you want to know that phosphorus number because you need the phosphorus for energy. ATP: the p in ATP, is phosphorus. It’s in all the membranes of every cell, so it helps yo.

What goes in and goes out is determined by that membrane and then potassium, which isn’t even used by the plant. It’s just sort of an activator like a vitamin enzyme kind of thing and those are the key things you’ve got to have. And if you don’t have those now, you need the trace elements as well and so you need to make sure that if you’re using a commercial fertilizer that you know what is in it. Does it have the micronutrients that you need? It might not.

GN: Last question. You mentioned another word that a lot of people hear and they freak out: fungi or fungal or fungus. They are not all bad, at least when it comes to the soil.

JL: No definitely not. Your soil should have great numbers of bacteria and people don’t get freaked out by that. In a teaspoon of good gardening soil there’s 600 million to a billion bacteria, probably more. There’s also incidentally something we don’t talk often about but we should. It’s called archaea. Archaea looked like bacteria and until 1978 everybody thought they were bacteria but then some guys discovered it’s got a different cell wall and it does slightly different things than bacteria and it turns out it’s the third branch of life. Holy cow! Who knew?

So these archaea are very important and they’re very important in the nitrogen fixation process they oxidize ammonia anyway they’re very important and they’re in that little teaspoon and then you can have up to 14 15 16 feet of invisible fungal hyphae in that same teaspoon. Wow. Pretty crowded in there and again they weave together all this stuff and some fungi are saprophytic, meaning they decay all the organic material that you want to break down and make available to the to plant and some of these mycorrhizal fungi, depending on where you’re getting your soil from, are in a teaspoon. It’s just spectacular and then you’ve got all the other things in there as well but no they’re not bad they’re definitely not bad and, of course, we’ve got that television show right now or you know everybody’s freaking about the fungi eating. But they really are necessary components in your garden

GN: Important stuff. Jeff Lowenfels, thank you for being with. Love your enthusiasm. Loved having a chat with you about soil.

JL: It’s so critical. Anytime.