http://www.organic.com/Non.profits/F2F/Sdpcs/building.soil.html -- Lawrence F. London, Jr. mailto:london@sunSITE.unc.edu http://sunSITE.unc.edu/InterGardenTitle: Building Your Soil Building Your Soil The Living Soil...
The world of soil is ancient and magical, contradictory and complex.
Mostly solid and opaque to light, still it acts as a sea to thousands of species that travel through it horizontally and vertically.
It is the biological filter that detoxifies a large proportion of the poisons that are applied to the environment.
One gram of ordinary farmyard soil can contain over one billion individual bacteria.
One gram of ordinary farmyard soil can contain over 100 million individaul actinomyctes.
One gram of ordinary farmyard soil can contain over one kilometer of fungal hyphae.
One gram of ordinary farmyard soil can contain plants like algae and animals like collembolids, nematodes and worms.
- An excerpt from The Revered Earth, by Helen Mayer Harrison and Newton Harrison