WHAT LIES BENEATH In the first part of a new series, gardener Alys Fowler looks at how we can improve the health of our gardens’ soil by using compost
ARTHROPODS (mites, spiders, beetles and millipedes) shred organic matter, such as leaves, speeding up decomposition.
WORDS ALYS FOWLER ILLUSTRATION MICHAEL CRAMPTON
hen we think about our gardens, we tend to think only of what we can see; the bit above. But the garden below is as rich and intricate as anything that grows in the light. The subterranean garden grows deeper than the trees towering above, and has its own fauna, infrastructure and a rich microbial world that works with plant roots to explore, colonise and extend the reach of the world above into the horizons of the world below. Your garden is important for many reasons, but one that has been vastly overlooked is its role in protecting one of our most precious resources: good soil. Healthy soil has many functions and roles. It provides structure, recycles nutrients for plant growth, purifies water, removes pollutants, regulates carbon storage stocks, and creates habitats and homes. Unlike much of farming land worldwide, our gardens contain potentially highly fertile soils with a resilient and rich biodiversity that is relatively untampered – think of the soil under any perennial, shrub or tree that remains undisturbed, in comparison to a ploughed field.
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The soil food web One of the fundamental aspects of soil ecology is the soil food web. This web encompasses the community of living things that spend all or part of their life in the soil, everything from worms to millipedes to moles and microbes – the billions of bacteria, nematodes, protozoa, actinomycetes and fungi that you can’t see with the naked eye. Past practices and learnings have often 82
NEMATODES are prolific and mostly beneficial, consuming everything below them in the chain, and some above.
PROTOZOA (amoebae, ciliates and flagellates) work with and, mostly, live off bacteria.
