What's up everyone? Welcome back. We are continuing our series this week on teaming

with microbes, a book by Jeff Lonesfels explaining the soil food web what it is

and why it's important to gardeners.

Today we're going to go into an interesting little

sidestep, I guess you could say, in the soil food web,

one that many aren't familiar with, and that is Arcea.

Arcaa are a type of life that many people just don't really know about.

So what are Arcaa and why are they important to the soil? We're going to get into that in today's episode and we're going to talk about Garden Maker Naturals who are the sponsor of the podcast.

So they make natural organic fertilizers. I'm sure that if you listen to this podcast on the regular you might be sick of me talking

about it but I really like the product and I've like it so much I've created my own the

epic soil starter it's a custom mixed fertilizer you can go find that on gardenmaker.com. Now what are

Arkea these are microorganisms many people thought for a while that they were

just a weird type of bacteria, but in fact they have now taken their own

spot on the tree of life. They are separate from bacteria, but it doesn't really

matter so much what they are because we don't need to get that

deep into the biology and the science of it.

But what do they do for gardeners?

What do they do for our soil? That's what we really care about. So if you're interested

more in the technical definition of an archaea, then definitely check out the book. It's called

teaming with microbes and teaming is TEA- I N G not TE M I N G although I think

that would have been a good title too. So like bacteria Arkea are decomposers in the soil, they break down both organic and inorganic materials

and they bring those elements back into a format in which plant roots can absorb them.

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