How to build a live and healthy soil in your garden?

What is healthy living soil?

Healthy living soil is the most important factor for growing vegetables, fruits, and grains. The soil must be replenished each season so that plants have all the nutrients necessary to grow. It must be protected from erosion to build healthy topsoil and from the sun, wind to preserve the moisture content. Soil quality directly relates to good nutrition, and they taste better and improve health.

The untrapped minerals in any kind of soil are only accessed by humus complex. Humus is the most important thing in organic farming. Humus provides food for the soil biota includes bacteria, microorganisms, earthworms, and many more small insects. The organic residues left after the extensive decomposition of organic debris (leaves, woods, grass clippings, branches, and other plant parts) by bacteria and fungi is called humus, it contains 60-70% of the total organic carbon in soils. It contains a good mix of clay, sand particles, and air pockets. The clay holds minerals and the sand allows drainage. Healthy soil acts as a nutrient bank by storing nutrients that are ready for plant use. The nutrients are not leached out of the soil and have a balanced PH level.

How air pockets in the soil help the plants to grow healthy? 

• It provides space for the soil to hold the water.
• The air provides oxygen that the plant roots need to be able to use the nutrients.
• They allow easy, fast, and deep root growth and it will help the plant roots to take up more nutrients and water from the soil.

Humus- Nature's gift in organic farming:

        Rich humus is black in color. The hand full of humus contains 28 miles of hyphae ( fungal threads) and fungi are able to absorb and transfer all 15 major and minor nutrients that are necessary for plant growth. It contains chains of sugar molecules that help cement together soil aggregates and also has countless billions of bacterial bodies whose proteins will be further reduced into soluble plant nutrients. 

Decomposition of leaves by fungi

Importance of humus in the soil:

• Nutrient storage: they form active chemical structures called humic acids, latter it becomes humate. It provides long-term nutrient storage.
• Root colonization: the fungi provide protection to plants from parasitic fungi, bacteria, and nematodes. It secretes globulin and other antibiotic metabolites to protect the plants.
• Improve soil structures:  fungi are producing extracellular polysaccharides that bind soils together and improve porosity.
• Break up heavy soils:  hyphae grows between clay platelets and glue them into aggregates.
• Transfer the Pure sand into a biologically active form:  is transformed by mycelium threads of fungi, it clumps together loose silica particles and it improves to absorb rainwater, otherwise, it would percolate right through the sand.

The fate of falling leaf :

    

    Once the dry leaf fell down into the ground from the tree it contains nasty chemical compounds that protect from munching insects. On the next day or so, once the dew has wetted the leaf, the protective chemicals begin to leach out from leaves. The leaf droops moistly against the soil. 

When the leaf is rinsed free of polyphenols and other bitter-tasting compounds, tenderized by moisture the feast begins by soil microorganisms.

    First bacteria that lain dormant under the leaf surface, they secrete enzymes that tear apart the long chain of sugar molecules composing the leaf cell walls. Then wind-born spores of fungi land and burst into life and soon the white threads of fungal cells called hyphae knit the lace works across the leaf. Fungi process the board spectrum of enzymes that able to digest lignins and other hard eat components of plants. This gives the critical niche in the web of decomposers, without them the earth might be neck-deep in fallen undecomposable tree trunks.

    Moistened by rain and softened by microbial feeding the leaf quickly succumbs to attack by large creatures ( larvae, earthworms, millipedes..). Besides breaking down the organic matter, these microbes also build up soil structure. Rain wash some of the released nutrients down in soil through airways. Where feeder roots tap into a mutually beneficial relationship with soil microorganisms. The tree takes minerals through photosynthesis from deep in earth high up to leaves. Then the tree resumes the availability of organic matter from above. So the cycle of falling leaf composed into nutrients continues.

Beneficial relationship between plant roots and fungi:

  Mycelium of the fungus( living fungal threads) invade young roots and provide organic nitrogen directly to the root system. The mycelium proteins digested by enzymes in the roots will enter the sapping current of the tree as soluble nutrients. The tree gives food for fungi in turn tree benefits from a vast network of fungal mycelia that enhances the absorptive capacity of roots. 

 The ratio of fungi and bacteria begins to shift, plants provide cellulose to fungi to increase their diversity. Fungi hyphae from one plant reach out into the soil and actually interact with the threads of other fungi joined to other plants. They will exchange nutrients, moisture, and chemical signals about changes in the environment to each other when needed the most. When symbiotic feeding is available to plants it becomes healthy and resistant to disease and pests.

Types of beneficial fungi:

1. Ectomycorrhizal fungi:

         Fungal mycelia are visible on and around the roots, it can be seen with the naked eye, it looks like root tips appeared to be covered with a white layer.

Increase the root absorption area by inserting their hyphae between epidermal cells of the roots in forming a sheet around the feeder root of trees. It stimulates the growth of many more short roots, increases the net again in the root absorptive area.

2. Endomycorrhizal fungi:

        Sends their hyphae into every cell of roots. It forms structures on penetrating hyphae, that branch out like miniature trees (arbuscules) to absorb food within the root cortex itself.

Release trapped nutrients: It secrets enzymes into the soil to dissolve hard to capture nutrients such as phosphorus and iron. It grows within rocks, contribute to mineral weathering.