Dandelion Weeds
Fancy Vaccine or Soil Transfusion?
“Soil inoculant” sounds like a drug injected into soil with a Shrek-sized syringe to grow a giant, festival-bound pumpkin or two. More accurately, soil inoculant can be described as a transfusion that helps soil hold on to ingredients plants need to take up nutrients and water. As beneficial to plants as coffee is to executives, soil inoculant restores hundreds of naturally-occurring micro-organisms involved in the soil food web. In other words, ingredients in soil inoculant boost plants’ metabolism.
Soil Profile
An extract of active soil or concentrate, soil inoculant is derived from healthy, organic and nutrient-rich soil and often added to biologically rich compost to jump-start a fertilizer-climaxed soil. “Inoculated” soil benefits your landscape by balancing friendly bacteria and fungi for optimum plant growth while making the below-surface environment inhospitable to weeds.
Nature’s Good Bacteria
When a person suffers a yeast infection after taking antibiotics, the balance of natural flora in the body is upset. Friendly bacteria and friendly yeast co-exist in normal amounts, but are destabilized when antibiotics kill off friendly bacteria. Yeast then overgrows and begins to “chew” on things it shouldn’t be chewing on, and causing inflammation. When a doctor or nurse recommends eating yogurt with active cultures, the purpose is to restore natural levels of bacteria to the body.
Soil Mycorrhizae - "Friendly Fungus"
Like yogurt, soil inoculant contains natural flora and fauna, bacteria among them. Of course, yogurt for humans is often not a cure: suppressing all sugar and refined carbohydrate ingestion is sometimes necessary for yogurt to work its magic and get rid of a yeast infection.
Likewise, for soil inoculant to work, soil needs a petro-chemical vacation. More on that later.
Weeds Imprisoned
Garden Weed
Like overgrown yeast, weeds are a symptom of imbalance. Weeds have their place in nature. When climate, predators or natural catastrophe kill slow-growing plants, weeds race to cover bare soil. Bringing nutrients to the surface of depleted soil, and dying quickly (within one growing season), weeds deposit nutrient-rich organic matter as mulch on top of the soil, readying it for other plants to grow.
As evolutionary Plan B-ers, weeds do not depend on micro-organisms, i.e., friendly bacteria, worms or fungi, to take up nutrients, oxygen and water. In the stressful, Plan B-type situation, weeds starve friendly fungi of nutrients, out-compete other plants, sucking up nutrients like nitrogen and water as fast as a teenager eats spaghetti.
The micro-organisms in soil inoculant — worms, nematodes, protozoa and such — work in symbiotic relationship with beautiful Plan A plants only, giving them an immune system. Without soil’s natural micro-organisms, weeds win. With micro-organisms, soil imprisons weeds in an environment where they are at a disadvantage. In other words, in the presence of micro-organisms, weeds lose.
Rarely do weeds get knocked out by pretty plants and micro-organisms in Round 1. Success is typically reached somewhere around Round 3, when pretty plants “friend” enough micro-organisms to help them reach critical mass. Round 3 means the third application, or a third season, depending on the complexity of a planting design. Plants occurring naturally together –that is, those growing together in a natural environment– typically share micro-organism needs. Thus, planting designs based on natural communities respond much faster, and win sooner their battle against weeds.
Blue Fertilizer
Petro-Chemicals: Enemies of Healthy Plants Soil
Fertilizers, pesticides and many herbicides (chemical weed killers) are predominantly byproducts of the petroleum chemical industry, which suffered decreased demand for its products when we won World War II.
When nitrogen extracts were no longer needed to make bombs, surplus organophosphates, originally used for nerve gas, became a boon to golf course managers and farmers. Nitrogen fertilizers became a magic elixir for public and private landscapes the world over, not to mention agriculture. Who in their right mind could protest such a beautiful, multi-recreational, food-producing result? Children of the future are likely to read about a Fertilizer Revolution, as much as children now read about Agricultural and Industrial Revolutions.
Post-War Fertilizer Ad
Today, we are beginning to realize the cumulative effects of petroleum-based chemicals, whether in landscape, food containers or cosmetics. As biotech companies like Genentech and Chiron research the bejesus out of everything presumed to cause cancer, and others of us are busting our legs and arms out of autos and armchairs to join triathalons to support the search for cures, many of us are questioning just what cumulative effects the use of landscape chemicals have on our environment, if not on us, personally.
What is not hard to understand is the story of the man and wife who, terrified of spiders, hire a pest control company to spray the perimeter of their home with Diazanon three times a month, and wonder why the wife suffers from asthma so severe that she now never ventures out of the house. The chemicals that kill outside pests we imagine creeping into our household more than they actually do, invariably kill, or curb, populations of micro-organisms that support the plants we love and suppress weeds. Fertilizers, too, overwhelm micro-organisms and de-couple the symbiotic relationship favorite plants have with the microbial friends. Without their natural micro-friends, pretty plants become hyper-dependent on fertilizer and pest-killing drugs, and weeds gain the upper hand. That is, if we don’t Round-Up the weeds to death as soon as rapidly as they appear.
Landscaping The Future … With Soil Inoculant
Presently, knowledge of natural methods of landscape plant and weed management, and use of soil inoculant, are the domain of few landscapers and gardeners. While more join their ranks in this back-to-the-future scenario every day, the average property manager or home gardener is likely no more eager to venture into the soil inoculant future than they are to purchase a new computer wholly dependent on a version of Microsoft Windows that’s been out for less than six months. Those who have a penchant for experimentation, an uber-active desire for a chemical-free environment, or a newly-constructed building surrounded by a landscape newly denuded of its original topsoil (by a developer who made money hauling and selling it away) — those people should read more or invest in a landscaper with relevant experience and training.
~DeeAnn Schuttish
Learn More:
Soil Inoculants www.caes.uga.edu/publications/pubDetail.cfm?pk_id=7884
Phosphorus Fertilizer or Mycorrhizal Fungi www.the-compost-gardener.com/phosphorus-fertilizer.html
12 Points on Malathion www.bodymindhealing.info/malathion.php
Study Links Organophosphate Insecticide Used on Corn With ADHD www.beyondpesticides.org/news/daily_news_archive/2007/01_05_07.htm
More Evidence Organophosphate Pesticides Raise ADHD Risk in Children www.medscape.com/viewarticle/727225
