This Week's Feature

Healthy soil is full of tiny lifeforms - bacteria, fungi, protozoa, nematodes, arthropods and earthworms. A fun way to determine the biology in your soil is by performing the Soil Your Undies Challenge. This challenge consists of burying a pair of 100% cotton undies beneath your soil and digging them up two months later. The cotton is food for the hard-working microbes, therefore, the more cotton gone the more biology your soil contains.

Dr. Stephen Shafer, customer, collaborator and owner of Anchorage Farm, shared his soil your undies results with us. As they say a picture is worth a thousand words. Looks like his soil contains quite a few hungry microbes. Click here to view Stephen's analysis from his first soil your undies experiment performed last year.

Have you taken part in the Soil Your Undies challenge? If so, we would love to hear about your results. Respond to this email or contact us and we may feature you in next week's newsletter.

Famous Quote

“The soil is, as a matter of fact, full of live organisms. It is essential to conceive of it as something pulsating with life, not as a dead or inert mass. There could be no greater misconception than to regard the earth as dead: a handful of soil is teeming with life.

The living fungi, bacteria, and protozoa, invisibly present in the soil complex, are known as the soil population. This population of millions and millions of minute existences, quite invisible to our eyes of course, pursue their own lives. They come into being, grow, work, and die: they sometimes fight each other, win victories, or perish; for they are divided into groups and families fitted to exist under all sorts of conditions. The state of a soil will change with the victories won or the losses sustained; and in one or other soil, or at one or other moment, different groups will predominate.”

~ Sir Albert Howard, Botanist and Organic Farming Pioneer

Source: The Soil and Health: A Study of Organic Agriculture