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How to Turn Good Loose Soil into Sticky Clay

With few exceptions, farmers and gardeners alike complain when they have to deal with heavy clay soil - the type that sticks to their boots and tools. Whole industries exist to loosen such soil or to assist water in penetrating brick-solid surfaces. But, if those frustrated growers were to step over to any nearby naturally wooded area, they would discover that the soil under those untended trees, shrubs and grasses is generally loose to the point where a person can scoop into it with bare hands. What's going on here? Why dense sticky clay a few feet away from loose...

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The Search for The Great Fungi

A few years ago, I had the opportunity to observe an experiment that consisted of transplanting tomatoes into large pots containing pure beach sand - unwashed and quite salty. Each of the dozen or so groups of test plants had been inoculated with a different type of endomycorrhizal fungi - Glomus mosseae, G. intraradices, G. aggregatum, Gigaspora margarita, etc. Very quickly it became obvious that the beach sand was a less than ideal potting medium. The non-inoculated control plants died almost immediately, followed by most of the test plants. Some test group plants survived, but were weak in appearance and...

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Bio-Lawns Make Better Sense

Lawns are interesting. A nice lawn is generally considered to be an integral part of most landscaping in the U. S. and serves as both a decorative and practical feature. A lawn is a cooling, dust-free, barefoot-friendly and attractive part of most homesites. Much advice has been written about how to successfully maintain a lawn - which is essentially a monoculture crop of grass. A huge industry has built up to produce specific chemicals for weeding and feeding lawns, along with countless service companies who will apply those chemicals on a periodic basis. At one level, these products obviously "work",...

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Introducing Beneficial Fungi to Established Trees - Worth Doing?

The topic of this newsletter was prompted by a note I recently received from a customer, who stated: "Three years ago I planted a small orchard of cherries using your product on all but one row -- I wanted to see if this stuff really worked. It did. The results were startling from the onset. However, I now need to get these trees up to their brothers rate of growth!!! How do I apply the product and at what rate?" He has decided to try probing inoculant down to the root zones of the "Without" trees, and I hope the...

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Looking for a Growth Business Venture?

Based on the many agreeing comments I received after last month's newsletter, the idea that soil advisors should analyze biological elements as well as just simple chemical elements was on target with many of you. To continue further with that thought about advisors looking at the biological activity in soil, let's keep in mind that a bioassay requires someone trained in microbiology looking through a microscope to identify and count little critters. Which leads to the point of this newsletter: I can pretty well count the number of well-organized and inexpensive bioassay services on my thumb and first finger! As...

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