What's going on everyone? Welcome back to the podcast. Kevin here from Epic

Gardening. I'm here with Nicole Masters. She is the international agroecologist

and we are going to be talking today. We've talked a lot about my chrysal fungi. We've talked

about protozoa, about nematodes, about the soil food web in general and kind of just

what's going on beneath the soil. So today we're going to talk about how to know

what's going on in your soil, what is growing down below.

And so, Nicole, I think this is a really good one

because it brings it back down to, hey, how do I use this knowledge in my garden?

So how does someone even begin to tackle this problem?

So really, the whole process starts by really turning on your eyes and your observations. And so as a lot of Gardner is just extraordinary at above ground, you know, what

plants are they growing, the health of those plants, you know, they blow me out of

the water with their practical skills, but not enough for digging underneath the

soil to have a look at what's happening around the plant roots and what's happening with plant

health.

And so if we really want to figure out what's happening above ground, we have to dig below ground.

That's the most important part of all of this.

And so it's, you know, unfortunately having a look at plant roots, which is going to disrupt your plants.

But are we seeing deep? is there any limitation to those roots being able to move down freely? And if you think

about plant roots, like imagine you're on a cityscape and you've got tree

roots pushing up the road.

I mean, roots physically can push through and go through anything really hard and tough, what stops them though might be something

like a change in pH or it might be compaction that's making alcohols or methane or something

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