What's up everyone? Welcome back. We are continuing our journey through the Soil Food Web, but today we're taking a bit of a detour, a bit of a break, and we're talking about some more practical elements.

What does this all mean for growing annuals and growing veggies? A lot of us

are growing veggies, that's what we're doing here, and we want to know why the Soil Food Web

even matters.

What is the point of all of this stuff?

Well, there are two different sort of types or characteristics

when it comes to the soil food Web. There are soils that are

dominated more by bacterial life and there are soils that are dominated more by

fungal life. And one of the precepts that Jeff Lohimfels puts out in this book is the idea that plants like vegetables prefer a bacterially dominated soil, whereas plants like those found in an old growth forest prefer fungally dominated

soils. And so if you are growing veggies, that means that you want a bacterially dominated soil. Soil that has a lot of

nitrates in it which is what vegetables and annuals prefer and you want a relatively teeming soil full of different types of life.

And so one way to make sure that you actually have this is to stop Roto Tilling come

spring. And if you're listening to the episode when it was published, is coming so instead of rototilling you can

employ what is called the no dig principle which basically just means you don't double dig, you don't use a broad fork, you don't tell,

certainly, you don't rototill even a lot of people still do this and

to eat their own however you break up quite a bit of fungal structures and soil life if you do that.

And so it doesn't make a lot of sense to do that if you are adhering to the principles set out in this book where you actually do value the

Soil Food Web, you value all of the complex relationships and interactions that are

happening in the soil and you know here's just a bit of history behind plowing the earth

Jethro Tull a lawyer he inherited a farm in southern England, and he invented a seed drill that placed seed at a certain depth.

So basically a cedar, he invented a little mechanical cedar.

And then he encouraged farmers to loosen up their soil before planting their crops because he saw that veggies did better in loosened soil and actually from this he concluded that plant roots had mouths, small mouths, and eight soil particles because back in those days and this was the 1600s and 1700s,

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