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"Teaming With Microbes: A Gardener's Guide to the Soil Food Web," by Anchorage's Jeff Lowenfels and Wayne Lewis, is a 180-page tour of life in the underground, the world of bacteria, fungi, nematodes, protozoa and others that dwell unseen beneath your feet. Read this book and you'll never think of soil the same way. You may feel you've just acquired several billion pets.
The book, published by Timber Press, covers relatively new soil-science discoveries, a world opened up through powerful electron microscopes. It reveals who's down there, who's eating whom and how plants manipulate this action for their own benefit. It also explains how chemical fertilizers are equivalent to carpet bombing since the salts they contain are indiscriminate killers.
Microbiologist Elaine Ingham is the pre-eminent scholar of the soil food web (a term referring to the complex system of life forms that exist in soils) and president of Soil Foodweb Inc., an international group of soil biology laboratories, which grew out of her research at Oregon State University. She wrote the book's foreword and has nothing nice to say about nonorganic fertilizers.
"Urban dwellers and other growers have been pouring toxic chemicals on their soils for years without recognizing that those chemicals harm the very things that make soil healthy. Use of toxics to any extent creates a habitat for the 'mafia' of the soil, an urban war zone, by killing off the normal flora and fauna that compete with the bad guys and keep them under control. ... Think about your neighborhood: Who would come back faster if your neighborhood was turned into a chemical war zone? Opportunistic marauders and looters, that's who."
The lesson of this book comes in two parts: The first explains the science of the soil food web; the second, how to nurture that web to benefit the soil, and thus the plants whose roots reside there.
Among those who have read "Teaming With Microbes" is Detroit News garden writer Jeff Ball, who was "the garden guy" on TV's "Today" show for eight years and will soon release his ninth book, "Four Steps to a Perfect Lawn and You're Probably Not Doing Any of Them."
"Teaming With Microbes" isn't so much a book for "yardeners," as he calls dabblers, but it's great for the gardener and for garden writers like him.
"I think it's a major first," he said. "It's the first time anybody has been able to put this together in a sort of logical fashion, and in basic English.
"Jeff didn't invent the soil food web. Ingham started the process, but she got so involved with her own business and the politics of compost tea (which has its skeptics), she never was able to put the whole story together.
"There are some fairly complex technical concepts in there," Ball added. "Positive ions and negative ions are a real fast way to put people to sleep. Jeff, I think, did a really good job of explaining this without turning (readers) off."
Kym Pokorny reviewed the book for The (Portland) Oregonian and also had good things to say:
"...'Teaming With Microbes' is being touted as an important volume. I agree, not only because the information is, as Lowenfels puts it, 'revolutionary,' but also because he's written it in a style so on-the-spot clear and easy to grasp that my dog, Sadie, could understand it."
Lowenfels and business partner Lewis did exhaustive research for the book, including experiments in their own yards and kitchens. Writing the book, Lowenfels said, was like "having a baby elephant."
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This makes Jeff the Cal Ripkin of garden columnists. His fellow garden writers, however, knowing that Jeff is also an attorney, have dubbed him 'America's Dirtiest lawyer.'
