You could think of the three years he spent on this project as penance.

Lowenfels has cranked out weekly garden columns for the Anchorage Daily News for 30 years, never missing a week. As far as the national Garden Writers Association is concerned, that makes him the longest-running garden columnist in America. For most of those years, he was a poster boy for Miracle-Gro, his water-soluble fertilizer of choice. He even had Miracle-Gro commercials filmed at his house.

This led to spirited debates with the strictly organic crowd at GWA conventions. No one could persuade Lowenfels to change his ways

LOWENFELS' CONVERSION

Then one day an e-mail arrived from Tom Alexander of Growing Edge magazine. Attached was a photograph taken through a microscope of a fungus attacking a nematode, a soil-dwelling microworm. "Soil food web. You lose," the message said.

This rocked his world.

The research frenzy that followed led him to Ingham, who helped adjust his vision from macroscopic to microscopic. He saw the light. And when he did, he felt awful. He had to fess up to his readers that he'd been giving them bad advice for years.

"Alaska gardeners trust me and do things on my word (that) they would not normally do without checking up. So when I realized for the first time that my system of gardening resulted in more work, more diseases, more failure, I was despondent that I had betrayed my readership. Clearly, it called for an explanation, an apology and corrective action ... sort of like a drunk deciding he's had his last drink and will now make it up to his friends and family."

Lowenfels also introduced the soil food web to other garden writers around the country by arranging for Ingham to speak at a Garden Writers Association conference in Seattle a few years ago. David Ellis of the American Horticulture Society, based in Alexandria, Va., remembers it clearly.

"I was there at the meeting where he basically said, with near-religious fervor, ... everyone was going to leave the room a changed person, that we would never look at gardening in the same way. In my case, it was true. It really opened my eyes to what was going on underground."

"He doesn't go off chasing windmills," said Robert LaGasse, executive director of the association. "You've got to prove it to him. But once you've proven it to him, you can't shut him up because he's very passionate about what he does."

Lowenfels, who carries that life-altering fungus-vs.-nematode photo around in his wallet, has already started work on the second edition of "Teaming With Microbes."

"We found one little mistake, and that's just driving me nuts," he said. (The definition of "pH" on Page 41 somehow got goofed up.) "And there have been new discoveries made. There's a whole kingdom of creatures that were not even included."

Lately, Lowenfels has been doing a lot of speaking about the soil food web around the country -- at universities, at garden meetings, at tomato festivals.

He's just a little possessed. You can tell by the way he and Lewis sign their book:

"May the microbes be with you," he writes.

"And, believe me, they are," Lewis adds.

Get the book today, click here

See Page 1, Garden Writers Go Underground

Reporter Debra McKinney can be reached at This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it

By DEBRA McKINNEY Anchorage Daily News

Published: September 14, 2006

Sure, it's a gardening book, but it has all the drama and suspense of an extraterrestrial thriller. A cast of characters without eyeballs or backbones. Battle scenes with bizarre creatures devouring one another. Only this book is about as terrestrial as it gets.

"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."

Get the book today, click here

"Jeff really gets a kick out of writing that column," said Emery Cupples, a longtime Lowenfels reader. "I would say there aren't many articles that he's written that I haven't read. There's information in that column you wouldn't get anywhere else. He just does a lot of research."

Like Cupples, anyone who reads Lowenfels' column knows of his very public conversion from devout Miracle Gro man to his new role as the Rev. Jeff Lowenfels of the Church of the Soil Food Web.

For several years at Garden Writers Association meetings, the strictly organic people tried to convince him to give up chemical fertilizers.

"We'd have this discussion at the bar every year, and I would say, 'You tell me why nitrogen is not nitrogen, why it's different on the (elements) chart than it is when it comes out of the back of a horse ... and I'll never use Miracle Gro again.' And nobody could ever do it."

Then a few years ago, he got an e-mail from Tom Alexander of Growing Edge magazine. Attached was a microscopic photo of a fungus attacking a nematode, protecting the root system of a tomato plant. "Soil food web. You lose," Alexander wrote.

"I thought, what the hell is he talking about? So I did a LOT of research. I mean, my wife was gone, and I worked like crazy on this thing. I didn't sleep for 24, 48 hours. And I found a world out there I had no idea existed."

He pulls out his wallet to show what he's talking about.

"I don't have a picture of my wife in here. I don't have a picture of my kids in here. I have a picture of a fungus and a nematode."

An oversimplified, nutshell explanation is that root systems produce exudates and carbohydrates that attract fungus and bacteria, and while they're down there dining away, the joke's on them.

"They're the bottom of the food chain," Lowenfels explains. "They get eaten, and the things that eat them poop out excess nitrogen and feed the plant right in the root zone.

"That's how trees get fertilized. Not Miracle Gro. Not MagAmp -- you know what I mean? So, ha! I never knew that."

That's because until recently, soil researchers couldn't see what was going on down there, he said.

Lowenfels' Miracle Gro days were over -- because chemical fertilizers contain salts that suck all the water out of these beneficial, simple cellular structures and kill them. "I was so embarrassed," he said. "I couldn't believe I had been writing about gardening for as long as I had and had never heard of half these words."

Words like "mycorrhizal," "hyphae" and "vascular arbuscular."

After he had researched this to death, he went public. The Daily News ran ads of him facing away from the camera: "Lowenfels is turning his back on 25 years of gardening," they read.

"And then I wrote a column that said: 'You know, I've been wrong for 25 years. I've been giving you bad advice, really bad advice.'

"I don't use the term 'fertilizer' anymore. It's 'organic microfoods.'

"So now I buy the beers at the meetings, and we don't argue this anymore. Because the argument's over."

"Now he's an evangelist," Alexander said.

He is. He's just finished a book on the subject, a collaboration with longtime business partner Wayne Lewis, with a foreword by Elaine Ingham, who pioneered soil food web research. He's calling it "Teaming With Microbes: A Gardener's Guide to Using the Soil Food Web." It's being published by Timber Press and is due out sometime in late summer.

Lowenfels and Hoersting first came to Alaska on their honeymoon in 1974 and soon returned, planning to stay five years.

"It was a different mind-set than we have now," Lowenfels said of the gardening scene. "People came up over the highway in their Volkswagen vans with all their records and hi-fi equipment and five or six plants they either had at their college dorm room or that were cuttings from their grandmother, and those plants were their family, their connection to the Outside. To lose one of those plants was a serious, serious problem."

So in the beginning, indoor plants it was. Their first year up here, Lowenfels actually had a little cultivation business going in his law office, growing coleus plants and selling them to Woolworth's.

The chance to do some serious outdoor gardening soon came, though, when a client at the firm where he worked said she was looking for "someone with a gardener's touch." Her husband had died, she'd moved away and she needed someone to care for their house.

That's how Lowenfels and Hoersting came to be the last to live in what's believed to be the first house built in Anchorage: the historic Oscar Anderson House, now a tourist attraction, on the edge of Cook Inlet.

They moved in and soon realized they weren't alone. As Lowenfels tells it, "We are the young couple referred to on the marker outside the building as having said it was haunted.

"All sorts of strange things happened. Lights would go on. Shades go up and down. Windows opened. Footsteps on stairs. Furniture would be blocking doors. Nothing serious. All friendly ghost stuff."

Lowenfels was thrilled to get his hands back into dirt. The gardening column came about a year later.

Back then, The Anchorage Times had the big circulation and the Daily News was the underdog, a seriously struggling one, while lawsuits over a joint-operating agreement gone bad got hammered out.

Lowenfels, an assistant attorney general at the time, became co-chairman of a group trying to keep Anchorage a two-newspaper town. He even sold Daily News subscriptions during his lunch break -- a couple thousand of them.

The Daily News' editor and publisher, the late Kay Fanning, was floored.

"She looked at me, she sat down, she said, 'What else can you do?' And like an idiot, I said, 'You know, I can write a garden column.' "

His column debuted Nov. 13, 1976. It was about Christmas cactus and poinsettias, and it was called "Petal Power."

To him, that sounded like a bicycling column. But he didn't complain. It wasn't like he was getting paid or anything. Not yet, anyway.

Week after week he'd bring in his columns, first handwritten, then typed on yellow legal paper. Suzan Nightingale ended up giving him one of the paper's office chairs as thanks for helping out.

"Some people frame their first paycheck. I sit on mine.

"So anyway, I wrote the column, and I figured, what the hell, you know? I mean, a couple, six months of this stuff and the Daily News will get back on its feet, everything will be hunky-dory and I'll go back to just practicing law and that will be the end of that. Next thing I know it's been a full year. Wooo. OK, so we celebrate."

As a way of thanking readers, Lowenfels arranged a special deal through an East Coast garden supply company for people to buy 100 tulip and daffodil bulbs.

"If we could get 100 people to buy these things, they'd give us this discount," he said. "And 1,700 people bought these packages.

The Lowenfels bulb deal turned into an annual plant-a-tulip program that brought 150,000 bulbs to Anchorage one year alone, winning him an Urban Beautification Award.

That was 1980, and he was just getting warmed up. That was before he discovered the Garden Writers Association and the Garden Writers Association discovered him.

Lowenfels went to his first meeting in 1982 and found himself sitting next to the garden writer for The New York Times. That's when he realized there was a lot more to this garden column thing.

He got on the board and eventually became president. For years he tried to talk the group into having its national convention here. But some felt Alaska was too far removed from the mainstream gardening community.

Wrong thing to say to Lowenfels. They came in 1994.

"He sells Alaska," said the association's LeGasse. "How do you know if Jeff Lowenfels is selling Alaska? He's talking. If he's talking, he's either talking about gardening or Alaska or gardening in Alaska.

"I'm surprised you haven't elected him to office."

Lowenfels arranged garden tours all over the city and up and down the highways. By all accounts, the event was a whopping success.

"Having done meetings for 30 years, when they're over, I'm ready to leave," LeGasse said. "When these meetings were over, I stayed another week. When that week was over, I still wasn't ready to leave."

Lowenfels helped create the Garden Writers Foundation, a scholarship program. And he's founder of another program on the verge of going international, one to help feed the hungry.

"It was below zero," Lowenfels said, recalling its beginnings. "I was coming back from dinner at The Red Sage, a very fancy, very expensive restaurant around the corner from the White House. I was coming back and going to my very fancy, very expensive hotel, and I had my hand in my pocket around some loose change. A guy came up to me and said, 'Do you have any money? I'd really like to get some food.'

"Now in D.C. they tell you -- like they do here -- don't give money to panhandlers; agencies are supposed to take care of them. So I didn't. I had my hand AROUND the money! I went back to my room, and there was a bowl of fruit and a bottle of wine. I really felt bad and had trouble sleeping -- because the guy had said, 'Come with me; watch me eat.' "

On his way home, somewhere over Seattle, he got the idea of asking readers to plant an extra row in their gardens and donate the harvest to Bean's Cafe. That became the Plant a Row for Beans project. And that grew into Plant a Row for the Hungry.

"The program is now in every state of the union. We've got inquiries from Europe, Australia, New Zealand, Latin America. I mean, it's just a phenomenal little program."

Last year, gardeners across the country donated more than 1.2 million pounds of produce to food banks and soup kitchens.

"Again, something good comes from something bad. I will never forget walking by that guy."