Gardening with Nature - How to Grow Your Own Vegetables, Fruit and Flowers by Natural Methods

INTRODUCTION

Mr. Leonard Wickenden’s Gardening with Nature is an American classic, but to the British amateur gardener it would be, in its original form, a mixture of sound and practical advice, and utterly misleading information. It takes very much more than an English binding to ‘translate’ any gardening work written to cover all the climates from Florida and California to Washington and Maine so that it will fit our small islands in the latitude of Labrador, but warmed by the Gulf Stream and richer in keen gardeners to the square mile than any other country in the world.

What has stayed unchanged is Mr. Wickenden’s forceful prose, for unlike the British ‘compost addict’ or organic gardener writing for the converted, he is extremely practical, marshals his facts, and when he argues it is with a transatlantic simplicity and punch that is unusual in this particular field. My task has been not only to adapt his principles so that they apply to Nature as we have it in Britain, with almost every pest different and the gardeners’ friends shorn of the praying mantis, but to make this also a book on American gardening.

I have had the assistance of Miss Katherine Hunter of Callestick, Truro who, in partnership with the late Eleanour Sinclair Rohde, was the foremost pioneer in growing unusual vegetables, in selecting the best varieties and the growing methods so that the adventurous gardener, in any part of Britain, can grow squashes, pole beans, snap beans, sweet corn and many other American vegetables, which are new flavours and well worth adding to any garden after trial on a small scale. By avoiding the problems of digging the information out of a wilderness of burlap, hardware cloth, Mexican bean beetles and chickadees, and trying to guess whether Pennsylvania is near enough to Aberdeen for the same sowing dates to apply, we hope that we have given these vegetables a fair chance in the British garden. Those which are possible in a cool greenhouse are also included and those which have not a chance, or are not worth the trouble, have been excluded. Someone in Britain has tried these methods and they work.

Very many things that we do in England are impossible in America. As an example, broccoli, savoys, brussels sprouts and leeks will all stay in the winter-locked garden until wanted, while across the Atlantic these must be preserved by canning or freezing. We do not need their preoccupation with shading against scorching sun, the reverse side of the medal to the ease with which they can grow so many things which are part hardy with us. We can envy them the grape as a fruiting trellis-coverer, the easiest of all fruit, but it is more than mowing and rolling for five hundred years that makes a perfect British lawn; it is simply not having the sort of summer in which ‘Heat Slays Hundred’ followed by fifteen feet of snow and frost that strikes deep into the ground. Therefore many parts of this book are straight from the experience of British organic gardeners so that we, Mr. Wickenden and myself, hope that the Anglo-American result will be helpful not only to the experimental and the organic gardener, but to the American in Britain who is homesick for pumpkin pie, okras, or Chinese lettuce.

I should like to take this opportunity of thanking Miss Hunter for the very great help, without which this book could not have been fitred into our conditions, and Mr. Cyril Cowell, who drew the weeds, the pests and the garden friends that have replaced the Japanese beetles, stink bugs, corn earworms and potato leafhoppers of the orginal.

LAWRENCE D. HILLS

PREFACE

HOW TO USE THIS BOOK

If you have bought this book, or if it has been given to you, obviously it is your property to use as you see fit, but since the author has lived with it since its early infancy perhaps he will be forgiven if he offers a few hints in the hope of increasing its usefulness.

It is largely a ‘how to’ book and most of the chapters are an attempt to pass on to you what the author has learnt from many other gardeners and from years of practice and experiment. But it is something more than that. It tries to set forth, in non-technical language, the scientific basis on which the organic concept of plant growth is built. It aims at putting you, the reader, in a position not only to defend your gardening philosophy but to convince your gardening friends of its rightness and wisdom.

It is hoped, therefore, that regardless of the kind of gardening that interests you most you will read Chapters 1, 2, 13, 14, 20 and 21 and the Appendix. You will find that the information in Chapters 4 and 5, which deal with the care and rearing of seedlings, is applicable to both flowers and vegetables, but after that you can pick and choose. If your only interest is in flowers, you will decide to skip the chapters on vegetables and fruits, but perhaps the one dealing with hedges will prove suggestive and, after reading Chapter 11, you may decide to use a corner of your garden for an experiment in herb growing.

The book, as a whole, seeks to give the ambitious gardener—the one who feels a constant urge to try something new—a helping hand in bringing his expanding activities to success. All the projects of which the author has written have brought to him and his family pleasure, satisfaction and, in some cases, profit. It is his hope that this book will do exactly that for those who read it.

L.W.

CHAPTER 1

FUNDAMENTALS

What is Soil?–How Formed, How Destroyed–Restoring Worn–out Soil–Minerals–Use of Rocks–Lime–Nature’s Method of Maintaining Fertility–Soil Analysis

Seated at my desk starting to write this book on how to run an organic garden, I am trying to form a mental picture of you, the reader. My trouble is that you keep changing. First I see you as someone like myself, living in the country with a flower, fruit and vegetable garden about an acre in extent and with plenty of room to expand if you wish to do so. Then you suddenly become a town-dweller or a suburbanite with a garden 25 ft. × 100 ft., anxious to produce in the plot at the back of your house such a mass of blooms that your neighbours will come to see and to marvel. Next, I am disconcerted to find that you are not interested in flowers; what you want is fresh produce that will bring food to your table and health to your family. I am not even sure of your sex and, as for your age, you may be young, middle-aged or—no, not old; no gardener is ever really old; just mature.

Regardless of who you are, male or female, tall or short, lean or plump, homely or handsome, owner of a small patch or of unlimited acres, I want, in this book, to share with you what I have learnt in many years of gardening and in a dozen years of organic gardening. So that all may get equal shares, it seems I must keep as close as possible to fundamentals that apply to all gardens, regardless of their size or location. The primary fundamental is, obviously, the soil. That is true of every garden, no matter what method of culture may be used—unless we except hydroponic installations which are not real gardens at all but chemical laboratories. It is doubly true of organic gardens, for, in them, the gardener looks to his soil to give him not only luxuriant growth but also resistance to disease and insect attack. So let us start with the soil.

If a group of gardeners was asked to define soil, I suppose the general definition would be that it is the material in which plants grow; that it covers a great part of the earth’s surface and that plants of all kinds, from the tiniest weed to the giant sequoias, put forth their roots and draw sustenance from it. Very likely, someone would say it was ‘dirt’, but the kindest thing to do in his case would be to pretend that nobody heard what he said; if dirt is matter in the wrong place, no word could be less applicable to soil which, as definitely as anything in this world, is matter in the right place.

It is, however, most desirable that an organic gardener should have much more exact knowledge about his soil than is covered by definitions as general as these. Without such knowledge, he is at a disadvantage in his discussions with proponents of chemical agriculture who will take advantage of his ignorance and proceed to ‘prove’ to him that the fertility of his garden cannot be maintained without the use of commercial fertilizers. The feeding and handling of his soil may also be rather hit-and-miss in character and he will live in a state of uncertainty in the midst of conflicting advice, constantly wondering whether what he is doing is the best for his crops.

The first thing to realize about soil is that it has not been here since the beginning of time and that it is by no means everlasting. It is a built-up material and in some cases eons have been required for the building; but it does not take eons to break it down. Only about a quarter of our farms are more than 100 years old, yet the experts tell us that half our topsoil has already gone. To enable us to restore that loss and to prevent further destruction, it will help to know how the building was done and why it has been so easily and so quickly torn down.

When the world was young, its surface was bare rock, devoid of soil. The first step in the production of soil was the disintegration of the surface of the rocks. This disintegration resulted from a variety of causes, which are frequently lumped together under the one word ‘weathering’. Water played a big part. In freezing, it expanded and broke the rocks; glaciers of immense size and weight moved over the surface of the earth and ground rocks to powder; alternate freezing and thawing split them; flowing water dissolved minerals and carried suspended powder, depositing it when the flow slackened. This pulverized rock was not true soil. Not until life appeared and the primitive plants grew to maturity, died and deposited their remains on the surface did soil have its beginning. As century after century rolled by and animal life appeared in ever-growing volume, the accumulation of organic matter grew also and so the greater part of the land surfaces became covered with soil.

Soil, then, is a mixture of mineral and organic matter. Most of the organic matter remains in the top layer; immediately below this layer is the upper subsoil, below that the lower subsoil, then usually a layer of broken rock and finally bedrock. The roots of plants, in most soils, penetrate far below the topsoil and draw upon the minerals in the subsoil. Even topsoil is, normally, mostly mineral matter. If we except peat and Fen soils, any soil which contains 10 per cent of organic matter on a dry basis is unusually rich; plenty of productive farm and garden soils contain no more than 3 or 4 per cent. These figures are worth remembering, because this low percentage of organic matter in normal soils necessarily means that the percentage of mineral matter is correspondingly high. It is exceptional soil that is low in mineral matter.

On cultivated land, organic matter is constantly breaking down and being used up. Worn-out soil is that which has lost most of its organic matter; it is still rich in minerals. Indeed, the soil of abandoned farms that dot the more thickly populated parts of America is richer in minerals, generally speaking, than that of farms which are still producing bumper crops. When crops are taken, season after season, from fertile soil with an original composition of, let us say, 5 per cent organic matter and 95 per cent mineral matter, the organic content will be steadily depleted until it reaches, perhaps, 1 per cent. The mineral content will then be 99 per cent. Ask yourself how such soil can be benefited by the addition of mineral fertilizers like superphosphate or muriate of potash. One might as well feed sand to the Sahara Desert.

There is one sure way and one only to restore a worn-out soil: raise its organic content. There is one sure way and one only to conserve the fertility of a rich soil: maintain its organic content. These facts are inescapable and all the arguments of all the professors in the world cannot change them.

A question probably arises in your mind: is the 99 per cent of mineral matter in a worn-out soil any good or is it so much sand? Obviously, the question is of prime importance. If the phosphates and the potash and the long line of minor and trace elements disappear as rapidly as the organic matter, then it is clear that merely restoring the organic content will not replace the lost minerals. Let us look into the matter.

First of all, it is important to realize that it is difficult to find material which is wholly organic and also suitable for adding to the soil. All naturally occurring organic matter contains some mineral matter. Anyone who has ever sat before an open fire and watched the ashes accumulate has no difficulty in realizing that. Ashes, of course, are the mineral matter in wood and coal and are incombustible. Similarly, manure, compost, fallen leaves, straw and all vegetable and animal wastes contain minerals which are, necessarily, those that are needed for animal and vegetable life. Therefore, when restoring the organic content of your soil you are simultaneously adding mineral matter also.

That, however, is of minor importance compared with the fact that the subsoil is a mine of vast supplies of a great variety of minerals. Remember how this subsoil was formed. It was built of pulverized rocks, some of which were brought from distant points by moving glaciers or flowing rivers. Countless analyses of this mixture of rocks have shown that it is very far from being pure sand or clay. The United States Department of Agriculture has collected soils from all parts of the United States and has published representative analyses in the Atlas of American Agriculture. They show the presence of phosphates, potash, calcium, iron, aluminium, manganese, magnesium, sodium, sulphur and titanium. More recently, analyses of rocks have been made at the University of Missouri under the direction of Dr. W. D. Keller and similar findings have been reported, with zirconium, barium, fluorine and other elements added to the list.

Dr. Keller, however, tells us that continued farming is rapidly depleting our potash reserves and he quotes figures. He tells us that in the year 1944 we took out of our soil in corn (grain) 454,880 tons of potash.¹ He makes it clear that he views this fact with alarm and at first thought it does tend to produce feelings of panic. Four hundred, fifty-five thousand tons is a lot of potash, no matter how you look at it, and one’s reaction is to conclude that in a few years there will not be any potash left in our soils. Let us, however, do a little figuring.

That corn was grown on 97,078,000 acres, so that the amount of potash removed per acre was under 10 lb. Going back to the analyses made by the U.S.D.A., we find that (if we exclude those soils which were practically pure sand) the percentage of potash ranged from about 1 per cent to about 3 per cent. Let’s take the lower figure. Let us also assume that the roots of corn penetrate to a depth of 5 ft.—surely a conservative figure. An acre of soil, 5 ft. deep, will weigh about 20,000,000 lb. Using our figure of 1 per cent, it will contain 200,000 lb. of potash. Even if we make the absurd assumption that we never return anything to the soil, we would still, theoretically, have enough potash to keep the corn crop supplied for 20,000 years. So, while 450,000 tons look like a lot of potash, it is equally true that 20,000 years look like a lot of time.

However, even a billionaire, if he is thrifty, does not continually draw on his capital, so by all means let us maintain the level of potash and other minerals in our soil; if the organic matter that we use does not provide sufficient, let us add pulverized rocks such as limestone, phosphate rock, granite, greensand and so forth. Let us bear in mind, however, that an average yearly dressing of as little as 2 tons per acre of manure or compost would provide more than the 10 lb. of potash needed for replacement. Other crops, of course, may remove somewhat more potash than does corn but in no case sufficient to change the situation materially.

The situation with phosphorus is a little different. In most soils, the phosphorus content is appreciably lower than that of potash; over against this, the amount of phosphorus that crops take from the soil is also appreciably lower. It is, however, a reasonable assumption that your garden soil will be more likely to be low in phosphorus than in potash; since manures also have a relatively low phosphorus content it may be to your advantage to give your soil a dressing of pulverized phosphate rock. Such dressings are frequently given by gardeners and farmers employing organic methods and the use of potash minerals such as greensand¹ or granite meal¹ is almost as common. Such materials have none of the disadvantages of superphosphate or muriate of potash. They are but slightly soluble and the minerals they contain are gradually released to plants by the action of acids resulting from the breakdown of organic matter; in other words, the process is a perfectly natural one exactly similar to the release of minerals from the pulverized rock of which the soil is so largely composed.

I cannot leave this subject, however, without admitting that a distinguished advocate of natural methods maintains that the store of minerals in any normal soil is so great that any further addition is superfluous provided conditions are created which make it possible for crops to draw upon this immense supply. I refer to Edward H. Faulkner, author of Plowman’s Folly. Writing in The Land News he states:

‘The professional agriculturists . . . can still prove that what is actually happening as a matter of course, right here on my farm now, would not be possible. The real truth is that when conditions for life have been righted life proceeds spontaneously. . . . All I have done is to mix in by modern methods the single ingredient nature requires in order to perform the complex changes which must occur before the soil becomes productive again. The savants are correct in assuming that the transformation is a complicated matter. They are just as incorrect in assuming that Man himself can do anything about that transformation beyond the simple surface incorporation of abundance of organic matter such as has been done here by my tractor.’¹ On the other hand, there are organic farmers, just as sincere as Mr. Faulkner, who claim to have improved their soil and their crops by using ground rocks. So the question seems to me to be still open. My own experience tends to make me join Mr. Faulkner’s side of the debate. I have experimented with both phosphate rock and granite meal in my garden. If they made any difference to the fertility of my soil it was not easily apparent; in View of the vast supplies of minerals in the soil and subsoil, there does not seem to be much reason why they should have done so. If an acre of land contains upwards of 200,000 lb. of potash, is it likely that 200 lb. (which would be all that a generous dressing of pulverized granite would supply) would make much difference?

Yet we cannot dismiss the evidence on the other side as worthless and even Mr. Faulkner must surely admit that, as long as we burn our rubbish and run our sewage into the rivers and oceans, a process of soil depletion is occurring, even though it be an extremely slow one. If we do as Mr. Faulkner advocates and incorporate in our soil an abundance of organic matter, perhaps evidence of depletion will not be perceptible for 10,000 years, so the problem can scarcely be considered pressing. None the less, it exists and there is something to be said for maintaining the level of potash, phosphorus and other minerals even if only for the sake of our descendants who will be alive in the year A.D. 11,956.

In the meantime, it will not be a costly matter for you to do a little experimenting yourself and the information you obtain will add that much to the world’s knowledge. If that is not reward enough, there is always the chance that you will obtain improved crops.

When it comes to lime, I firmly believe in its use in the form of ground limestone and I prefer dolomite limestone because it contains a good deal of magnesia as well as calcium. I like it and use it because it has the valuable property of correcting acidity—a matter of importance in our eastern states where soil tends to be acid. As will appear later, limestone is a regular ingredient of our compost. In Britain you need a quick-acting lime, and on a small scale, ground chalk or ordinary slaked lime (garden lime, which is calcium hydroxide) is both better and easier to buy. In the heap the carbonic acid from bacterial action turns the garden lime to calcium carbonate, which is chalk, so you can use either.

All that has been said above concerns what I have called ‘normal’ soils and what are commonly referred to as ‘mineral’ soils. Nearly all soils, in this country and in other parts of the world, belong in this category, but there exist in some places peat and Fen soils. A ‘peat’ is composed of vegetation which collects on the surface and cannot decay, usually because the summer is too short to give it time, so it builds up a hoard of humus locked up by its own acidity. Sometimes it cannot decay because it is too wet, as in a peat bog, but in both cases only specialized plants have good keys to unlock the plant foods, plants like heather, cranberries and moorland grasses. When they are drained and limed, because they are always very acid and water and acidity are their main troubles, they are low in potash and phosphorus; but with good farm-yard manure, lime and time they will grow good crops, that is as a garden, with special attention to rhododendrons and other peat-loving species. A ‘Fen soil’, mainly found in Norfolk and Cambridge, is made of plants that have decayed under water; it is neutral or alkaline and easy to tell because it is a fine black powder when it is dry, and if you light a bonfire in a drought you are lucky if you only burn a hole in your garden. These, too, need farm-yard manure, mainly to add bacteria, because this land is very rich in nitrogen and quite high in potash, but until it is drained and cultivated it is not fertile.

It is obvious, however, that soils such as these are low in minerals rather than in organic matter and to correct this deficiency commercial fertilizers are widely used. They are frequently leached away so rapidly that two or even three applications are needed in a year. Surely this is an obvious case in which ground phosphatic and potassic rocks are called for. The application of such rocks would tend to convert the soils into something approaching a natural mineral soil; leaching would be reduced to a minimum, minerals would be released as needed and the added rocks would provide trace elements in which the peaty soils are usually deficient.

Let us, then, clearly understand wherein lies the difference between gardening with nature and gardening with man-made ‘plant foods’. The organic gardener looks around him at the abundance with which nature grows her crops. Forests, jungles, prairies produce with such abandon that vegetation becomes almost impenetrable and competing growths choke one another in their struggle to exist. In vast numbers, wild life feeds on these growths, generation after generation. Even when man clears the land, left to itself it will, in a few weeks, be covered again with a dense growth of wild plants. What is the mechanism by which nature produces such rich abundance?

The mechanism is the same as that by which soil was first made. Vegetable growth dies and its residues lie on the ground. There, too, are deposited the excrement of animals and, ultimately, their dead bodies. Almost instantly, microscopic organisms begin their appointed task. What appears to the human eye as decay is, in reality, a process of construction—a building up of soil to provide food for another generation. The more man studies this synthesis, the more wonderful and awe-inspiring does it become. Working on wastes from animal and vegetable life, hordes of micro-organisms, in numbers beyond the comprehension of the human mind, produce from death and corruption a sweet-smelling soil, richly stocked with compounds to guard the health of vegetation not yet grown and with acids to dissolve minerals and prepare them as food for crops yet to come. Through age after age, death and resurrection have occurred and the Earth has never lacked its green carpet.

For many centuries, farmers of the world observed nature’s methods, saw that they were good and strove to imitate them. The wastes of living went back to the soil. Generation after generation, crops were grown and the soil retained its fertility. Until very recent times in the world’s long history, it was by such methods that man grew crops for himself, his flocks and his herds. A mere century ago, a man put forward a doctrine which taught that plants needed only certain elements and that abundant crops could be assured by adding these elements to the soil. He was not a farmer; indeed, his ignorance of agriculture was profound. But he was a skilled chemist and it was by laboratory analysis of vegetation that he reached his conclusions.

Thus did the great chemical fertilizer industry have its genesis, thus was the NPK mentality born. The farmer was told that to produce good crops he need only buy a mixture of chemicals which would provide nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium. It looked easy and many were tempted. It seemed, for a time, that the German chemist was right. Crops were often prodded to rapid growth when the mixture was added to soil. But the farmer did not realize that he was living on his capital. The chemicals stimulated the growth of micro-organisms in the soil so that the breakdown of organic matter was speeded up, giving temporary increases in production. But as the organic matter dwindled, yields fell and ultimately the soil was exhausted.

Other troubles were experienced. Diseases became more and more prevalent and the experts found that plants craved more than nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium. Thus the trace element era was born. The old-time farmer never experienced trouble from trace element deficiency because, without his knowledge, his soil contained them and his organic manures made them available. But as the organic content of the soil fell, trace elements became locked up and vegetation sickened. Insect pests multiplied, for it is always the sickly, ill-nourished plant that attracts pests.

Chemicals came to the rescue once again: poisons—at first, relatively mild poisons such as arsenic, copper, lead. Then, when these failed, more deadly poisons; and when the insects built up immunity to them, poisons of such terrifying toxicity that the farmer uses them at the peril of his life. Indeed, he uses them at the peril of all our lives, for there are few of us, to-day, who are not accumulating in our systems poisons that we absorb from sprayed fruit and vegetables and other foods purchased in the market. Such is the nature of artificial farming; artificial gardening has followed in its wake.

The term ‘gardening with nature’ explains itself. It seeks to co-operate with nature instead of fighting her; to eliminate the cause of disease, instead of treating symptoms; to build a healthy soil which will grow healthy, unpoisoned plants. The procedures it follows were developed by a great English scientist, the son of a farmer and a life-long agriculturist himself. His name was Albert Howard and in recognition of long years of service to his country in India and elsewhere, he was knighted by his Government. He died in 1947 at the age of 73, but his work lives on. All the methods advocated in this book of mine are based upon his teachings.

It may be that another question is troubling you. Perhaps you have asked your County Horticultural Adviser (look under ‘Agriculture’ in your telephone book for the National Agricultural Advisory Service if you want him) to take a sample of your soil, and the report he sends tells you that it is ‘deficient’ in calcium, phosphorus, potassium, magnesium, manganese and other elements. Is the analysis wrong? Is it possible that such highly trained and experienced chemists can be turning out inaccurate work? That is a good question, worthy of careful consideration. Let us look into the matter and see just what is the standard procedure for analysing soil.

The procedure starts, of course, with the collection of the sample. This is done by taking several slices, 6 in. deep, from various parts of a field or garden. The first doubt arises as to whether a sample taken from the top six inches of the soil will tell us what minerals will be available to plants when they send their roots down 6, 10, 12 or even more feet into the subsoil. Some professors of agriculture teach their students that the ‘feeder’ roots of plants are in the top six inches and that the deeply penetrating roots bring up nothing but water. That is hard to believe—indeed, I cannot think that the professors themselves really believe it.

No natural water is chemically pure. To obtain such pure water, the chemist must distil it under carefully controlled conditions. The condensed steam yields a water approaching purity but the residue left in the still is rich in a variety of minerals. In my young days, I worked in a laboratory in which hundreds of samples of natural water were analysed every year; not once did a sample come along that was free from dissolved minerals. Some waters were ‘soft’, which meant that the mineral content was low; some were ‘hard’ and their mineral content was high; but they all contained minerals. It could not be otherwise, for as rain water seeps through the soil, it dissolves minerals. If the topsoil is rich in organic matter, it will yield acids to the rain water and increase its solvent power. There cannot, therefore, be any question that water in the subsoil contains minerals and as the roots of plants absorb it they take in minerals with it. An analysis of the top 6 in., therefore, does not give a complete answer. That is point number 1.

When the chemist receives this quite unrepresentative sample, he proceeds to analyse it by wholly arbitrary methods which seek to approximate the conditions existing in the soil through the growing season. It is a matter of opinion as to how closely these methods coincide with the processes by which nature prepares nutrients for growing plants. My own opinion is that they are a very poor imitation. In the first place, methods differ from one laboratory to another with the result that the figures obtained also differ rather widely. This sad fact is recognized by the U.S. Department of Agriculture. In their Circular No. 757, entitled Methods of Soil Analysis for Soil Fertility Investigations, they say: ‘Because of the wide variety of chemical methods of soil analysis now in use, it is seldom that two laboratories obtain the same numerical values when determining such an empirical thing as the available phosphorus.’ (The quotation marks on ‘available’ are theirs.)

So even the ‘empirical’ figures given you by an analysis will depend very much on the laboratory to which you send your sample. Regardless of where they come from, they will represent only an attempt by the chemist to give you an approximation of the available minerals in the top six inches of soil at the time the sample was taken.

Let’s consider that last point. What the gardener wants to know, of course, is not the amount of minerals available on some particular date in early spring but how much will become available through the long months of summer and early fall. At 9 a.m. on May 1st, possibly the amount of phosphorus available to my seedlings is very small, but they, being vegetable infants, require only a very small meal. By the time the seedlings are half-grown, the hosts of micro-organisms in my soil will have prepared a much larger feast for them and, as the days go by and temperatures rise, the microbial hosts will grow ever larger and there will be no lack of nutriment for my full-grown plants. That is point number 2.

Finally, it is standard practice to sift a sample of soil through a 2-mm. sieve before analysing it. Two millimetres is about one-twelfth of an inch. Therefore, pebbles and other mineral particles that will not go through such a tiny opening are