Good Soil Bugs – Make them feel at home, and make it good enough to eat!

Often referred to as the soil food web, a healthy, living soil will be teeming with microbes, both beneficial and pathogenic (infective; able to cause disease). Including species of bacteria, fungi, algae, nematodes, protozoa, arthropods and earthworms, soil microbes are all vital in maintaining a healthy soil structure.

Often we’ll hear of a garden that is receiving the best of everything but still not thriving, something is just not right. The problem could be lack of beneficial soil microbes. How can this happen?

There are a number of reasons for a lack of microbes including indiscriminate use of fungicides, biocides, herbicides, nematicides or fumigated landscape soils and high salt fertilisers.

Microbe brewing is one way to overcome these problems and is easier than beer brewing. In just 24 hours, in ideal conditions you can brew billions of microbes that will help bring your soils to life!

As with all garden inputs, wear gloves and a breathing mask to ensure you don’t breathe the microbes into your lungs.

Once you have brewed and applied your microbes help create a comfy microbe home with regular composting, add minerals like Soft Rock phosphate and feeding the soils with kelp, fish, aloe, molasses, humic acid and fulvic acid.