Teaming with Microbes: The Organic Gardener's Guide to the Soil Food Web, Revised Edition Hardcover – Illustrated, February 24, 2010

I found this to be the best book I've read thus far for getting close to genuinely Understanding soil and therefore successfully knowledgeably gardening and farming in it.I recommend this book to people who want to know How and Why and are willing to dig deep so to speak in order to think bigger (sometimes by thinking smaller!). I do not recommend this to people who want Google to hurry up and tell them a simple answer. Because of this book I learned that Google's answers can easily be incorrect: Google will still tell you to Kill your Earth and the important Microbial Life within it with fertilizers that burn all your precious earthworms and Microbes away, making you 100% reliant on company's chemicals instead of the Earth. I am grateful to this book for opening my eyes, and I am now reading "Teaming With Fungi" to learn more.

Fertile soil is more than finely ground rock with some shredded peat moss and some roots and a worm or two sprinkled with some water and chemical fertilizer. Organic gardeners know that compost often holds a variety of visible lifeforms, but this book explains all the orders and families of lifeforms that can be found in a synthetic chemical free soil, with the most being microscopic in size. These tiny things are a food web, similar to what we call a food chain, which during their lifetimes contributes to the health of large plants like tree, and small like vegetables. However, I learned trees tend to benefit from fungal life forms that break down "brown" material like leaves and twigs, while vegetables and other soft stem plants prefere the bacterial forms that break down "green" material. There is much more explanation and detail of the life forms in a good composted soil, with some excellent photographs. It is easily read for such a complex subject, and get right down to the "how tos". One can open this book at any point and grasp what the authors have written. I have started a compost heap this spring, and I'm looking forward to seeing some of these forms under a microscope, and towards strengthening my drought stressed trees and shrubs. I got the hardcover because it's one of those subjects where I can look up a topic faster than searching on the internet. I am not knew to the concept of the vast kinds and amounts of organisms in the soil, but I still have learned useful facts. I think for anyone who is seriously into "organic" gardening, that is total avoidance of the synthetic chemicals, this is a useful reference.

I am a farmer and this book is fantastic if you want to know about soil life

My wife bought this three-book series Teaming with Microbes, Nutrients, and Fungi. I have studied a lot of material about gardening, plant physiology, chemistry, microbiology, etc., I am an engineer. This book, and all this series appeals to that. If read in the recommended order, you’ll find there is a ton of information that a person should know about. I especially love what I consider, “The New Frontier" in using the electron microscope. The pictures are really awesome. It has proven a lot of theory and adds real knowledge to old-world thinking, that of formula-based gardening. Does it help you plant a plant? Simply put, no. It assumes the reader is a practicing gardener. There is no magic formula in these books, only the background knowledge that every farmer, and gardener might want to learn about. I took this information and blended it with all of my other experience, and now my garden has exploded into a wonderfully healthy model of nutrient dense plant life, yeah, including some flowers for the wife. But I am into the plant health, and how it relates to my own health, that is really the bottom line. Read this series of comparably cheap books (costs about as much for a good hamburger) and take it in as information, as education that most gardeners seem completely ignorant of, and grow a little bit.

It covers from A to Z about soil life, and what you should know about what’s living in your soil. Good and bad!

Really enjoyed the book. Learned a lot. Most of the material in the book was new to me, and very worthwhile. I would have given it five stars, but I think the book comes up a little short in real-world application. I understand the concepts of a good soil food web and the disadvantages of chemicals and tilling and how this negatively impacts the soil. The authors didn't seem to offer any ideas on controlling grasses and weeds, other than by mulching, and I suppose pulling by hand. In my garden grasses and weeds can't be controlled by constantly pulling them, unless I want to dedicate 12 or more hours per day to the task (and I don't). I think the principles in the book can be applied properly on a very small scale. I have two 5700 sq ft garden areas. Not a farming operation, but larger scale gardening than most people attempt. Tilling the areas in the spring gives me a fighting chance against weeds and grasses. No amount of mulching seems to control the field grass in the gardens unless the ground is turned and tilled. After reading the book I was still scratching my head about that and looking forward to tilling in the spring. Otherwise I found the book to be excellent.

great book, great information all u need to know for notil cultivation!