Living soil is a soil or soil-like mix built from compost, aeration, minerals and organic amendments, managed so that bacteria, fungi, protozoa, nematodes and worms remain active. The organisms break down organic matter and release nutrients, so the grower feeds the soil rather than the plant, usually with top-dressed amendments and water rather than bottled fertiliser.
In practice
Living soil works best in larger volumes: beds or containers of 40-100 L or more, often reused for many cycles with no-till methods. Water quality matters (chlorine-free is often recommended), mulch keeps the surface moist, and cover crops can keep roots in the soil between plants. It is forgiving and low-input once established, but slower to correct: deficiencies are fixed with amendments that take days to weeks to release.
Myth check
House position: a well-grown hydro run gives a well-grown living-soil run a run for its money, even on taste; plants mostly don't care where their ions come from. Whether a symbiotic soil-plant effect adds flavour is an open question and a candidate Bay Trial (blind taste panel). See living soil.
Don't confuse with
- Super soil: heavily amended, but not necessarily managed for biology or reuse.
An organic fertiliser supplies nutrients from plant, animal or mineral-rock sources that soil microbes must break down into ions before roots can absorb them.An entomopathogenic nematode applied as a soil drench whose infective juveniles enter fungus gnat larvae and thrips pupae and kill them with symbiotic bacteria.No-till growing reuses living soil from cycle to cycle without turning or replacing it, cutting out the old root ball and replenishing with top-dressed amendments.A nutrient deficiency is a shortage of an essential element in the plant tissue, causing characteristic symptoms; the cause is often pH or uptake rather than an empty feed.Bay Trials are GenetixBay's member-run controlled grow experiments that test growing claims side by side and publish the results openly.Super soil is a heavily amended organic soil mix, rich in compost and slow-release amendments, intended to feed a plant through most of its life with only water.Top dressing is spreading dry fertiliser or amendments on the soil surface, usually under mulch, so nutrients release into the root zone as the plant is watered.Mycorrhizae are symbioses in which fungi colonise plant roots and extend hyphae into the soil, trading water and nutrients such as phosphorus for the plant's sugars.Compost tea is a liquid made by steeping compost or worm castings in water, often aerated with food sources, to extract and multiply microbes for the root zone.
