"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.