What's going on everyone Kevin from Epic Gardening here? We are joined again today by Dr Bethky

who is a soil scientist consultant for Pitt Moss and Pitt Moss is a sustainable growing

media made from organic recycled paper.

I think like I mentioned in episode one, I'm currently using it as bedding in my vermocomposting

bin, but certainly many applications for it, which we can talk about in a later

episode. Today we're going to continue the conversation about soil, so we talked about the

evolution of it, we talked about what makes a good soil, but now we're going to dive into living soil, and we have talked quite a bit about this in the podcast before,

but if you're a new listener or you need a refresher course. I think this will be a really good

episode. So I guess the first question Dr Bethi is is that title question. What

would you what do we mean when we were saying the words living soil? Well, when we talk about

living soil we want to have a soil that has biological activity that has some

microbial activity and some might have some small animals,

worms, some protozoa, even nematodes of beneficial living in it.

And the best way to do it is say it's not a dead soil.

And there's a lot of soil that's been killed in various means. One of the popular means in the more temperate

climates is to saturate it with water and then till it and make it very hard and there's no

porosity, no water water gas exchange and it kind of floods out and that removes

the good living materials that are in there that do all the beneficial work.

And then another kind of a dead soil would be those that are like the Kalichy clays,

the clays in the southwest where they've been polluted with the natural sodium and a natural salts and they become very hard and they just don't have an opportunity for microbes to grow and they don't contain much bacteria or fungi because there's no food for those.

There's no carbon in that soil.

Living soils are usually full of a lot of carbon-based materials, a lot of organic material, because that is the food for the microbes.

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