He also suggest to harvest lichen from the north side of trees and add water soak overnight and add as a foliar. Azotobacter lives and works directly with lichen and the lichen feeds the tree in this way by fixing nitrogen....
The more I read about Carbonatite the more I like it. High activity clays, enzyme co factors, all of the important minerals, and what eles could you ask for in one materal.
My plants seem to like it to the tilth it adds to my mulch layer is awesome.
Timbuktu
That does suck. Don't know if it has been updated. I kept the digital first edition.It's just nice to have it on the computer. It's a bit easier to reference.When TWM was released there wasn't a digital version offered - that didn't happen until the 2nd Edition was released but not really. When you would hit the TWM 2nd page at Amazon and if you selected the Kindle version you got a digital copy of TWM alright - the 1st Edition.
The only real difference was that a chapter was added in the 2nd Edition on mycorrhizal fungi with the rest left pretty much alone.
Hi Friends, author of the book and a long time "lurker" of these forums. There is a tremendous accumulation of knowledge here. I have enjoyed the bantering about Teaming With Microbes, though it takes a tough skin sometimes. What author likes to hear that his book SUCKS!
First, I thank all of your who have purchased Teaming With Microbes and Teaming With Nutrients. I hope you have been able to take-away something from each. I wrote each because the topics are important to gardening, gardeners and the environment. The topics were not something I felt most gardeners, including myself, knew about, nonetheless appreciated. I
For those who have complained about Teaming With Nutrients, I am sorry you did not enjoy the book. Again, I wrote it because most people who garden have no clue about fertilizers other than what the Miracle-Gro man tells them. I would not expect that criteria to be applied to members of this group. You are well above the norm when it comes to horticultural experience and knowledge. Yes, this is information you can find elsewhere, but in my experience you have to look at a lot of places. Yes, I did not add anything new to the chemistry or botany....if you were expecting a new element or something, I am sorry. I merely attempted to start at a beginning and teach myself and the reader enough chemistry and botany so they could follow the path of nutrients from the soil to the plant and get a feel for what goes on in those trillions of cells in each plant.
I did want to try and create some awe. 17 trillion cells in an apple tree---maybe only a trillion in good cannabis plant, all connected, membrane proteins that may only operate for a couple of minutes with each nutrient requiring its own kind, molecules somewhere along the line turning into life....
I did want to impress that you have to test your soils, just as you do hydroponics media. This may sound silly here, but no gardener really does this...yet we know information is power. And we know we are using resources wastefully. If you want the best soil grown plant you have to know what the soil lacks, understand pH etc. Again, not something most here need to be told, right? Testing is key.
But most of all I wanted to leave the reader with the tools to look at plants in a different way from now on....full of three dimensional cells, each full of over 10,000 different kinds of enzymes and 1000s of each of those, sending signals to uptake nitrogen, flowing sap, working ribosomes, mitochondria working away like protable generators after a storm...
I want the reader to be able to appreciate what an aphid is doing when it sucks the phloem juices and know why it won't just wash off, that the yellowing of leaves may not be due to loss of nitrogen, that you really can't foliar feed all the nutrients, why plants do best at 75 degrees, the role of nitrogen fixing bacteria, what that damn pH chart really means, how to respond to soil deficiencies and how to make your own soil fertilizers....etc
I want the reader to come away with enough knowledge to appreciate the wonders of what goes on inside a plant, how they are as complex as we are and even how they deserve a tremendous amount of respect.
I want the reader to appreciate more those beautiful and tasteful trichomes which are used in transpiration and to perhaps contemplate them in a different way....which, many here already do.
Finally, I want the reader to understand that what goes on in a plant cell is analogous to what goes on here on earth, and on bigger and bigger scales and to contemplate the possibility that we are just part of a small cell that is inside a larger cell inside a larger one......
My intention was not to create new science but to provide some tools so that people could figure out or at least think about what goes on inside plants and in the soil. Some will be come better gardeners as a result. Others will become more poetic.
Again,THANK YOU ALL for reading the books. I am sorry some think it sucks. Come here my talks, then, someday when I am in your 'hood so I can personally apologize.
Keep on reading the book! Oddly enough it is selling very well with great comments from "average joe's that wouldn't read 10 pages of it!" There are already requests for translation (TWM is in French, Korean, Slovenian and soon, Dutch). Please, critique the hell out of them. I deserve it and need it. There will be a third to complete the Soils Trilogy and I will try and take your thoughts into account
Teaming x 2,
Jeff Lowenfels
Anchorage, Alaska
P.S> sorry for not proofing. No disrespect intended.
i read teaming with microbes and it was fantastic, working on teaming with nutrients now.
alot of great info in both books, i never fully understood the soil food web until i picked up TWM.
i applied what i learned this year to my flower gardens and lawns outside, so far they are kicking serious ass!.
All the neighborhood women want a piece of me now due to my monster blooms!
They all ask what "fertilizers" i'm using , fuck those chem ferts!
My daughter answers for me, she tells them "it's just fish and poop"
That's how i explained it to her, she is only 5.
I can't remember everything but one is the backwards pH thing which I believe he brought up himself in his second publication; another is calling sphagnum peatmoss inert (if I recall correctly) In this case it was info given to him which he believed to be correct. That's all I can think of off the top of my head but none is earth shattering. We are all human and therefore subject to err. Some people clutch to things as fact and spout, well so and so said it.