Ethan, there will be others to chime in who are a whole lot book-smarter than I am.

We need to know your existing soil: Clay? Sand? Silt? What's your climate zone?

In general, the answer will be adding copious amounts of organic material (such as compost) and using organic mulch of your choice. The organic material replaces the food source these need and the mulch regulates moisture necessary for these to thrive while protecting them from the disinfecting sun.

I have good soil. We're usually dry here. When I use hay as a mulch, we get mushrooms even the expensive edible kind.

Leaf mold in situ works wonders with my clay soil. In the summer I still need hay mulch.

bon

Root fungi live on the sugars and amino acids that are secreted by the plant roots. If your plants are flourishing, they'll be flourishing too.

Why do you want soil bacteria to flourish?

I live in Portland Oregon and my soil is clay, but there is a top layer of black soil.

By keeping the level of organic matter(, compost, leaf mold, shredded leaves, hay and straw, any once growing plant material) up to par, not necessarily copious amounts.

"Black" soil may simply be lava and it usually means little. Soil is composed of the mineral portion (the sand, silt, and clay), organic matter, air, and water and the bacteria and fungi that could exist in soil need that organic matter to live. This Soil Biology Primer,

https://extension.illinois.edu/soil/SoilBiology/soil_biology_primer.htm

may be of some interest .

If you want to know more about the soil you have these simple soil tests may be of some help in discovering what you want to know.

1) Soil test for organic
material. From that soil sample put enough of the rest to make a 4 inch level in
a clear 1 quart jar, with a tight fitting lid. Fill that jar with water and
replace the lid, tightly. Shake the jar vigorously and then let it stand for 24
hours. Your soil will settle out according to soil particle size and weight.
For example, a good loam will have about 1-3/4 inch (about 45%) of sand on the
bottom. about 1 inch (about 25%) of silt next, about 1 inch (25%) of clay above
that, and about 1/4 inch (about 5%) of organic matter on the top.

2) Drainage. Dig a hole
1 foot square and 1 foot deep and fill that with water. After that water drains
away refill the hole with more water and time how long it takes that to drain
away. Anything less than 2 hours and your soil drains’ too quickly and needs
more organic matter to slow that drainage down. Anything over 6 hours and the
soil drains too slowly and needs lots of organic matter to speed it up.

3) Tilth. Take a handful
of your slightly damp soil and squeeze it tightly. When the pressure is
released the soil should hold together in that clump, but when poked with a
finger that clump should fall apart.

4) Smell. What does your
soil smell like? A pleasant, rich earthy odor? Putrid, offensive, repugnant
odor? The more organic matter in your soil the more active the soil bacteria
will be and the nicer your soil will smell, to a point. Too much organic matter
can be bad as well.

5) Life. How many
earthworms per shovel full were there? 5 or more indicates a pretty healthy soil. Fewer than 5,
according to the Natural Resources Conservation Service, indicates a soil that
is not healthy.

Another vote for organic matter.

What is the best way to keep soil bacteria and root fungi flourishing.

IGNORE THEM!

Keep the soil moist, add mulch or compost to the growing areas.

that's all it takes

Compost is really poor food for both fungi and bacteria. Consider summer cover crops heavy in C4 plants for best sugar production, and high biomass winter cover crops for production in the off-season. High energy organic matter (kitchen scraps or crop residuals for example) is also better than low energy (compost or leaf mold). You are right to try and increase those populations, since bacteria largely control organic N intake, and fungi largely control P and also water intake in case of drought. You can also use winter cover crops such as radish to effectively recycle nutrients. The smell when they die will let you know clearly that you have a bacteria factory right there.

I agree that worrying about bacteria and fungi flourishing is a bit of a stretch. Apply compost, keep moist, and what will happen will happen (and it's the right thing that happens). To the extent that bacteria and fungi are needed to degrade the compost, they'll show up without any encouragement. When you want to garden, I don't think you want to garden bacteria and fungi. I think you want to focus on the plants.

• What is the best way to keep soil bacteria and root fungi flourishing.

feed them.

Bacteria feed more on sugars... i use molasses. any sugar will do, but obviously its better to have one with monerals NOT stripped out.

Fungi feed on things like plant lignans, woody structures of plants that break down much more slowly...

woody mulch is good as food... something quicker might be fish emulsion (or some kind of liquid protein)... but, i have read that some Fish emulsion might feed bacteria also because of how they are processed... i am thinking milk might work

remember what you are trying to do.

different plants have different requirements.

plants which are more woody (large trees for example) will thrive in a more fungally dominant soil, while herbaceous plants (banana, most veggies) grow better in a bacterial dominate soil.

compost provides the microbes.

GOOD compost provides many species of microbes in the right ratios...(especially things like protozoa and nematodes)

Those protozoa and nematodes use fungi and bacteria as a food source.

Compost does not provide a lot of food for them though, if you are trying to feed the microbes below the soil line.

its the "waste stream" of protozoa and nematodes (and other microbes) that feed the plants... Fungi and bacteria do not directly feed the plants.

--------------

excellent video

Building Soil Health for Healthy Plants by soil scientist Dr. Elaine Ingham

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pDtGxOdDj1A

Elaine Ingham on Life in the Soil.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xPI0nkRR-1I

Feeding bacteria with sugar seems unproductive. What you need bacteria for is to digest compostables. If you feed them sugar, they will eat the sugar, and not the compostables. They will multiply accordingly. Yep, your bacteria will be flourishing! When the sugar is gone, most of them will die, leaving you with the same equilibrated population of compostable-eating bacteria you had to begin with.

Your application of sugar ends up doing nothing constructive, garden-wise. That is, the result of of adding sugar is probably mostly cleaning up the sugar you added. Sort of a circular task.

Yes, sugars feed bacteria, but no, they don't increase the digestion of compostables. They just increase the digestion of sugars.

Amino acids are what the bugs make their bodies out of, and amino acids are proteins. Amino acids are one of the biggest missing parts of the puzzle for restoring soil. Use soy bean meal as fertilizer. And use it twice a year. And dont skimp. Its special order from your local feed store, mine is 15 bucks for 50 lbs and has a 47% protein content. Divide the protein by 6.25 to find your N. Use some molasses water also when you can. No rush, they do not need much but do need a consistency. You can lay off some after the ground starts getting spongy. That means the fungi have come and run hyphae down into the soil and are drawing deep water up, as they feed on your bacteria and other offerings.

Carbohydrates (found in dead plant matter) are nothing but polymerized sugars anyway.

99% of us soil and compost nerds never pay for sugar to feed the soil. Mother nature puts a lot more carbohydrates onto the soil than sugars. With all due respect I don't see a need for this.

Mother Nature certainly does put sugars into the soil. Plant roots give off what are called "exudates," a whole variety of substances, among them simple sugars - glucose, fructose, etc. These sugars are relatively expensive for the plants to produce, but they are spending their carbon in this way to feed the colonies of rhizosphere bacteria in exchange for the many benefits these bacteria provide: making minerals plant-available, fixing nitrogen, promoting plant growth hormones, suppressing pathogens, etc. etc.

So the idea of feeding sugar to soil bacteria doesn't come out of thin air, since that's exactly what plants do. But I'm not convinced that we can improve on this very sophisticated machinery that already exists in the plant roots by dumping free sugars into soil or compost in hopes of feeding what? free-living bacteria? that aren't the same ones adapted to live on plant roots and trade resources with them? And what about all the other stuff that plant root exudates provide besides simple sugars? Any sugary drink we can provide is impossibly crude next to what the plant roots produce, much of which we don't even fully understand yet.

I tend to think it comes back to the basics: give the soil organisms a comfortable, protected place to live, with plenty of their natural food (i.e. plant roots and organic matter in the soil), and they will show up and do their job best without our attempts to improve on their processes. I liked the first part of the book "Teaming with Microbes" just fine - possibly a bit cutesy but a good natural history of the life in the soil - but the increasingly complex recipes for different varietals of composts (requiring an ever-growing shopping list of purchased ingredients) just make me lose my patience.

by the way, you can customize your compost to produce more of one kind or another type of microbe, depending on what your soil is lacking.

you can use a microscope to determine what you need and to verify what microbes our compost is made of...

"generally speaking" a more "woody" type compost (more carbon, less greens) will be more beneficial to woody plants (and vice-versa with herbaceous plants and greens)... though, you should verify this with a microscope.

http://www.livingsoil.net/soil-food-web

http://www.livingsoil.net/nematodes

http://www.livingsoil.net/protozoa

https://www.nrcs.usda.gov/wps/portal/nrcs/detailfull/soils/health/biology/?cid=nrcs142p2_053867

Mother Nature puts sugars in the rhizosphere, to be precise. It does not put sugars in the bulk soil. Sugars near the roots is what attracts feeding bacteria, and they are very green (C/N between 5 and 9). As protozoa eat them and expel the uninteresting N (to them), the plant is fertilized, generally with whole, energy-efficient amino-acids (and peptides ad larger fragments).

What nature puts in the soil is humus, which is then mined for nutrients by mycorrhizae. Organic matter not yet in humus form can be in the soil, on top of the soil, or in the rhizosphere, as roots will generally seek and cling to bits of OM. So I concur with those who are skeptical of the use of sugars in places where roots are not present.

"customize your compost to produce more of one kind or another type of microbe, depending on what your soil is lacking" ?

Yeah, that's what Ingham would have us do. Get our your microscopes everyone! To the extent a microbe is "lacking" in a soil there is no point in trying to do population management for it. Microbes largely all serve the same purpose, which is to break down organics. EXCEPT, there was once some evidence of a soil-borne microbe that could fix nitrogen. Researchers are still looking for it. Such a microbe would be enormously handy to have in your soil, and would revolutionize agriculture. Forget the legumes. These guys would do it all themselves.

Greenman said, "you can use a microscope to determine what you need and to verify what microbes our compost is made of..."

I have a degree in Microbiology and this is misinformation.

Identifying bacteria by appearance only, even if you stain them, is not possible. Same with fungi, unless you get the occasional unique fruiting body, but that usually is only good for getting to a closely related species.

Somehow, this idea got abroad that we should all be peering at our soil with microscopes to find out what kind of soil biota we have and then make different elaborate recipes of composts and things to fine-tune the soil critters.

It appears that this "microscope" notion is a misinterpretation or exaggeration of various statements made by Elaine Ingham and the Teaming with Microbes crew. Robert Pavlis wrote a blog post debunking this idea, and then had it pointed out to him that Elaine Ingham doesn't *actually* say you should do that, in so many words...but somehow that impression has been produced and then carelessly repeated. The blog post is here:

http://www.gardenmyths.com/soil-bacteria-myth-identification-managment/

This idea that you need to make different recipes of "fungally dominated compost" and "bacterially dominated compost" for different plants is mostly pointless make-work, in my opinion. Compost is great and has multiple benefits for the soil, but it's also supposed to be a way of frugally turning what would otherwise be "waste" to advantage, not a reason to run out and buy more stuff.

On the contrary, Elaine Ingham regularly touts the importance of microscopes for soil bacterial analysis.

http://www.soilfoodweb.com/Identifying_Organisms.html

She even recommends ones to get.

http://www.soilfoodweb.com/Microscopes.html

Go out in the forests or on the, wild, prairie where Ma Nature is in control and look at what is happening in the soil there. Adequate amounts of organic matter in those soil with an active colony of bacteria and fungi digesting the organic material that accumulates annually.

Perhaps this link to the Soil Biology Primer may be of some help.

https://extension.illinois.edu/soil/SoilBiology/soil_biology_primer.htm

On a philosophical note, this seems to be the type of question we are asking more and more about all sorts of things, not just soil fertility: Is it better to analyze and manipulate, or encourage the natural processes that are already there? The answers are not always clear. We are finding that in many subjects, some of the things we always 'thought' were a good idea actually do little, or are even detrimental. Others were right on but we only recently learned how and why.

I have no problem with analyzing and manipulating, if it gives you a buzz, but I think it's pretty clear that with regard to soil bacteria, and soil health, it's just not going to make much of a a difference. With regard to gardening, there are far more important things to worry about.

Tox, in an interview on youtube Haney states that the russians knew about all this (respiration vs fertility, and coupled nutrient cycles through biology)since the 1920s at least. The interesting part about it is that it is intellectually challenging. Just getting to the five basic soil principles took decades of work, and they just scratch the surface.

Dan ... As I said, I have a degree in Microbiology, took classes in optics and microscopy, used microscopes of various kinds for years ... and this is not possible without a lot of other lab equipment and special collection methods. The protozoa, for example, die quickly

"bring
or send your samples to them for assessment of total bacterial biomass,
total fungal biomass, numbers of the different active protozoa, and
numbers of the different functional groups of nematodes."

She has a nice little ecosystem going:

To get on her list os "certified analysts", you have to take all four classes at a thousand bucks each, then pay more for "certification" "Certification
Fees $2100 total to be paid for phase 2 and 3 to complete the
certification requirements. The fee is to be paid at the beginning of
each phase."

And she's an expensive speaker: She
asks that your organization buy the shuttle to the airport and back (or
have someone pick her up at the airport and return her to that
airport), round trip plane fare to the closest airport (prefer United
Airlines), hotel with good internet connections, food, and $3,500 per
day

Lazy, are you talking about Ingham? On what authority she is able to certify someone? Isn't she a government employee (at USDA I assume)?

Lazy, I hear ya. I have a science background as well. I'm not saying that folks can actually get a buzz by seeing bacteria under a microscope but just by thinking that they're going to.

As to Elaine Ingham, she's a well trained, and probably very smart person. But well trained and very smart people like to make money, and she's doing a lot of that. She was at Oregon State University, but she left about the time she was involved in a research scandal involving assertions not supported in the references she cited, and even non-existent publications. I understand that in the professional community, she has been largely discredited. She made some allegations about GMOs to the EPA that were simply false. I can point to documentation.

Please do.

Unfortunately, many of the original online documents have expired and or are behind a paywall. But if you Google "Elaine Ingham" and "discredited", you'll come up with a few. See for example the book excerpt http://tinyurl.com/lff7ybp. Her departure from the faculty of Oregon State coincided with this episode, and an unfriendly internal review. I can't say whether it was actually the reason for her departure. There were, I believe, professional apologies involved.

Now, very smart scientists sometimes throw up their hands at academia, and go forth to make money by forming their own scientific structures. Ingham seems to have done this. You get people who really want to believe her, and they'll pay for her wisdom. Her Wikipedia page ignores all of this, but I suspect it was written by her or one of her devotees.

Worrying about microbes makes sense if (and only if) they are your reason for gardening. Some people build gardens primarily to attract wildlife such as birds, deer, and butterflies. If you enjoy bacteria in the same way that other people enjoy lizards and colorful spiders, you should get that microscope and do your thing! Gardening is mostly for personal entertainment, anyway.

Dan you are smashing my real life heroes. But I will always have Marvin the Martian. And those crazy penguins. Still, she knows more than I do, and recently a fellow from India, by way of MIT I believe, continued some vein of that alcohol producing bacterium research and found enough success to make some news article I read.

Ethan, you can use this link to find a map that is a really good soil survey map.

http://www.arcgis.com/home/webmap/viewer.html?webmap=0edea1c7bbb84ba5842d20483af11679

Zoom into the address/location relevant to you and find your soil type. There are 12 types of soil, and depending on how the weather in that area treats it, you will be able to find your subtype. For example, I have Ultisol here in Birmingham, and it is rainy and humid, so I am pretty sure my subtype is Udult. This means the heat, moisture, natural acidity and aluminum toxicity at lower ph points to using dolomitic lime first and compost second, preferably mixed with charcoal. Add to that Sulphate of Potassium and a little Nitrogen and the soil here is much better. When it is not toxically acidic I can then use high protein Soybean Meal and other organic food to improve the soil for certain plants. One case is the creeping red fescue in my rather large dry shade areas. It is a grass that has a need for endomorphic fungal relationships, which is a little unusual.

I really don't want to be labelled as either a detractor or supporter of Dr. Ingham. I really never followed the stories. But there are facts. She is passionate about certain things, and I have to respect that, even if I might not agree with her about them.

'What is the best way to keep soil bacteria and root fungi flourishing.'

I think the best way to do this is to look after your plants. And the best way to look after your plants is to look after your soil.

GLIB ... Here's Ingham's CV:
http://www.soilfoodweb.com/drInghams_cv.html

She certifies you as knowing the protocol she developed herself. Whether that protocol actually tells you or your clients anything accurate or useful or if it's just Tooth Fairy Science® is unknown because it's never been tested. I don't know if the lack of independent testing is because the methodology is obviously and fatally flawed or if there is a seep state conspiracy by the GMOs to suppress her ...

http://gmwatch.org/en/news/archive/2001/8951-full-story-of-the-dr-elaine-ingham-controversy-over-klebsiella-p

************

As for caring for the soil fungi and bacteria ... just grow things suitable to your climate and don't dump a lot of additives, supplements and fertilizers and 'remedies" on your dirt. The microorganisms can take care of themselves.

Thanks Lazy (though the CV did not open). There are plenty of solid soil scientists to listen to even without her contribution. Agree on your recipe for decent soil, just keep it covered with vegetation so the flora has the habitat to take care of itself.

Hi Ethan. I moved to Vancouver, WA from Boise, ID.

We just had a pretty wet winter in this area and I notice that the soil in the back yard of my last place had a foul smell when it got churned up. I'm thinking that the soil was so wet for so long that it became anaerobic - no air in the soil. I'm thinking I'm going to be covering my garden bed with a waterproof cover this coming winter to prevent it from becoming waterlogged. I'm certain that moisture will wick up from below and keep everything moist while it's covered. I'll probably put some small logs under the waterproof cover to allow some air to infiltrate.

I'm thinking I'm going to be covering my garden bed with a waterproof cover this coming winter to prevent it from becoming waterlogged. I'm certain that moisture will wick up from below and keep everything moist while it's covered. I'll probably put some small logs under the waterproof cover to allow some air to infiltrate.

Otherwise, I recommend just keeping a supply of organic matter on the top of the soil. You won't want to dig OM into the soil, just let it be on the top.

As others have pointed out, the fungi will need a plant to feed them. At the end of this coming growing season, I'm going to leave some tomato plants in the garden bed. I had one survive the last winter and get an early start in the spring, so I know it can happen. I'll probably look for some sort of hearty heritage variety. That should help out the fungi.

Paul

Unless you have a hard pan, Paul, you are better off planting deep rooted cover crops, specifically, tillage radish in August, or if you accept multi-year cover crops, alfalfa and chicory. They will improve your infiltration rate by a factor by a factor of 10-20 over time, and resolve also the anaerobic condition.