Re: Beneficial microbes - Destroying forest soil?

From: Elaine Ingham (Soilfoodweb@AOL.COM)
Date: Thu Dec 26 2002 - 23:23:37 EST


Hi Allan -

You certainly can use "bait boxes", where you let the soil and litter layer
critters move into the bait. That's a way to get many of the bacteria,
fungi, protozoa, nematodes, microarthropods to move into the bait without
destroying the forest soil. The longer you leave your bait box in the system
of interest, the more likely you are to get more of the organisms. The more
varied the food resources in the bait box, the greater the diversity of
organisms you will be able to get from the system.

That's what Hoitink does with his compost piles at the edge of the forest.
Why not do that, or why not just take a SMALL amount, just once, from the
forest and get the inoculum in your compost? Multiply the organisms that are
in your best soil in the compost. Don't use up all your forest soil by
spreading it on your ag fields.

Elaine
President, Soil Foodweb Inc.
www.soilfoodweb.com


.



This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Mon Apr 21 2003 - 15:26:38 EDT