The Role of Bacteria in Soil

The Beet: A Podcast For Plant Lovers

Epic Gardening

Education, Home & Garden, How To, Leisure

4.8 • 1.6K Ratings

🗓️ 12 March 2018

⏱️ 5 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Beneficial bacteria get tossed around a lot in gardening circles, but what exactly do they benefit, and how do we use them in our gardens?

Learn More: Teaming With Microbes by Jeff Lowelfels

Keep Growing,

Kevin

Podcast Sponsor: Garden Maker Naturals

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You can get my Epic Soil Starter custom-mixed fertilizer over at Garden Maker. I designed it with one of their founders to take a raised bed from basic soil to super-charged in a single season!

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello everyone welcome back to the epic gardening show so today we're continuing with
0:04.9	our read-along with me book journey of teaming with microbes by Jeff Lownfels so this book
0:10.8	again it talks about the soil food web and what's going on
0:14.0	underneath the soil surface and why it's so important to your garden. So there's a
0:18.0	lot of science in this book, but if you keep that science in the context of gardening, it's a little less overwhelming and it starts to make a bit more sense.
0:27.0	Before we get into today's episode, which is going to be about bacteria in the soil,
0:31.5	we're talking about garden-maker naturalals. They are the sponsor of the
0:34.2	Epic Gardening Podcast. Very thankful to have them sponsoring the show. And I've
0:38.6	actually partnered with them to make the Epic So, that is a really cool organic fertilizer designed to take a raised
0:45.9	bed and sort of kick-start it with some good organic matter. So check that out at gardenmaker.com.
0:50.5	Okay, so bacteria are honestly the most abundant form of life on Earth.
0:59.0	They are the earliest form of life on earth and they are one of the most reproductive
1:06.9	forms of life on earth. In a mere 12 hours one single bacteria can produce 5 billion offspring if they're given the right conditions.
1:18.6	Obviously bacteria's weakness is that they will replicate until they sort of max out the carrying capacity of
1:25.6	their particular local environment so they will kill themselves by
1:29.6	growing too fast and you might say that I don't know are us humans doing the same thing hard to say my
1:35.6	personal vote I think that we might be just on longer time scales than bacteria
1:40.1	now what is the point of bacteria in the soil? They are primary decomposers. That is what they are called and they are responsible for breaking down a massive amount of the organic matter in our world, let alone our soil.
1:58.3	Actually, they're only second to fungi.
2:02.3	So there's different types of bacteria that will feed on different food sources, which is fantastic.
2:07.0	Obviously, we've heard of the stories of bacteria breaking down oil even, after certain oil spills that have happened recently.
2:15.3	And so how does this actually work?
	...

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