The Living Soil Guy

Nerding out on soil life, plant science, and what goes on behind the scenes of the agriculture and garden industry.

[The Living Soil Guy @ZayaFarms]

Soils support an enormous biotic biomass globally, with an estimated 2.6 × 10²⁹ prokaryotic cells alone, and harbor much of the Earth’s genetic diversity.

A single gram of soil can contain kilometers of fungal hyphae and more than 10⁹ bacterial and archaeal cells and organisms belonging to tens of thousands of different species.

[The Living Soil Guy @ZayaFarms]

@rahshields1111 That is good feedback, thank you! I will try out some pictures next week!

[The Living Soil Guy @ZayaFarms]

@rahshields1111 Thanks I appreciate that 🥹 I’ve got a lot written up still to come. Maybe will put it all together into a book one day.

[The Living Soil Guy @ZayaFarms]

@rahshields1111 Yeah… fortunately seems to be rare but I know somebody that this happened to and they had to basically throw out all their raised bed soil and start over.

[The Living Soil Guy @ZayaFarms]

There's a weed killer that can go through a cow, a compost pile and a bag of garden soil, and still wreck your tomatoes. 💀🍅

It's a family of herbicides that includes aminopyralid and clopyralid. Ranchers spray them on pastures and hay fields to kill broadleaf weeds. Grass is unaffected so, the cow eats the hay, Aminopyralid comes out in the manure, and ends up in finished compost.

About 1 part per billion can affect sensitive vegetables, and tomatoes have shown damage at 0.2 ppb, below what most labs can detect.

In 2010, several Washington farmers and gardeners lost most of their vegetable crops to it in composted dairy manure.

To avoid this, before you spread a new load of manure compost, plant a few pea or bean seeds in it and see how they grow. If you see cupped or curled leaves and twisted stems, throw it out.

[The Living Soil Guy @ZayaFarms]

@Mathew_Winters1 Oh I didn't even think about the weight of the breed. Good tip, thanks!! 😊

[The Living Soil Guy @ZayaFarms]

@PamelaJMarchant Stunning! 💛 Repeat blooming in modern roses traces back to Chinese roses, where a jumping gene disabled the gene that normally holds back flowering after spring, so the plant keeps making new buds all season.

[The Living Soil Guy @ZayaFarms]

@TubbyBats Radishes! They're ready in four weeks or less after sowing, so you see results fast. Salad leaves that you pick a few at a time are easy too.

[The Living Soil Guy @ZayaFarms]

@USGS Crater Lake never gets old. Mazama's eruption about 7,700 years ago also left the pumice that many of central Oregon's forest soils formed in, and that porous pumice holds more than twice the plant-available water of nearby basalt soils.

[The Living Soil Guy @ZayaFarms]

@kannbwx @BarchartAg Big shift from a year ago. Soybeans' edge on profitability is also because nodule bacteria supply roughly half or more of the crop's nitrogen, so you don't need to provide any N fertilizer unless you really want to push yields.

[The Living Soil Guy @ZayaFarms]

@AnSafiak Amazing! How many trees?

[The Living Soil Guy @ZayaFarms]

@SewellLeigh Great photo! Earthstars typically count on raindrops to squeeze those sacs and puff the spores out, but poking them is fun too. 👈

[The Living Soil Guy @ZayaFarms]

😂 Well, there is some research on your side. In one side-by-side trial of 14, 10, 7 and 0-day flushes, a blind expert panel found no real difference in flavor or smoothness, and if anything leaned toward no flush.

A University of Guelph study also found flushing didn't measurably lower nutrient levels in the dried bud.

[The Living Soil Guy @ZayaFarms]

@22liv22 What the heck? That is so cute!

[The Living Soil Guy @ZayaFarms]

Actually the trees take that volcanic CO₂ in through their leaves, not their roots! It seeps up out of the soil and the leaves pull it in through their pores.

Everything else checks out, though. On Mount Etna, researchers matched 16 spikes in satellite-measured tree greenness with spikes in soil CO₂ during 2017 and 2018.

[The Living Soil Guy @ZayaFarms]

@Iridian_Willow Good haul! I didn't get a chance to do squash this year so I'm just *a little* jealous seeing this. 😍

[The Living Soil Guy @ZayaFarms]

@IceAgeTrails Yup good call. Basil starts getting chill damage below ~50°F, well before an actual frost, which is why the leaves can blacken overnight. Pesto cubes are the perfect rescue! 😊

[The Living Soil Guy @ZayaFarms]

@NWSOmaha Remember when you cover plants, run the sheet all the way to the ground. Covers don't make heat, they trap the warmth rising out of the soil. Watering dry soil a day ahead helps too, since moist soil stores and gives off more heat.