Ecompost
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more or less, you are creating something called a microbial feedback loop. You can find more about this on-line, but essentially yes.The concept I got from Teaming with Microbes was that you can manipulate the cycling of nutrients. Say that you are about to start requiring more phosphate for flowering, you can use a bacteria dom tea, then at next watering you add a protozoa soup in with the next batch. The protozoa help cycle the locked up nuts in the bacteria, then when bacteria numbers start to dip the protozoa will eat other predators of bacteria, eventually allowing the bacteria to build back up.
Is my understanding correct?
So when we combine CO2 with water, we get a mild acid. It is this mild acid that etches minerals like P, K, Ca, mg, Fe and so on from clays, bedrock, and or organic matter in the soil.
In soil, the CO2 comes from microbes as they breathe and from plant roots. The water from the rain or us right? Add them together and get acid.
Acid mobilizes many plant growth elements. The bacteria scoop these ions up, especially cations, they do this because microbes are mainly gram negative, so they attract positive ions and can hold them on their bodies which they use as food, or to create things to access food.
As the bacteria themselves live, shit piss and sweat if you like, the excretions can be used by our plants. If we have enough CO2, we can say we have enough aerobic bacteria. If we dont or cant measure CO2, then we have little to no mineralization and nothing is being converted to plant food, ergo life stalls.
At times we get things which resemble a bait ball in the sea, Large groups of bacteria, covered in plant growth/ health ions, get hammered by larger protozoa, this results in a mass of soup, bits of microbes, ions and all sorts of enzymes being released in to the root zone.
plants are also able to secrete certain exudates from the roots and these can be used to attract say yeast based microbes, oince there are enough of these in an area, the plant literally swallow them whole. This process is called Rhizophagy.
All of the ways in which plants interact with microbes is not known, we are just beginning to unlock this so expect youir mind to change as the discoveries come in to us and new ideas are present.
I know some people are finding this hard to square, but the only way to know if your living organic system is working well is to measure the rates of CO2 from the soil you are using. You can count microbes with a scope, but if you aint got CO2 you aint got microbes working for you period. Add all the organic inputs you like, this fact wont change while CO2 rates are low.