Diane Miessler - Grow Your Soil!: Harness the Power of the Soil Food Web to Create Your Best Garden Ever

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Edited by Carleen Madigan and Sarah Guare

Art direction and book design by Michaela Jebb

Indexed by Samantha Miller

Illustrations by Kristyna Baczynski

Text 2020 by Diane Miessler

Ebook production by Slavica A. Walzl

Ebook version 1.0

February 25, 2020

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Miessler, Diane, author.

Title: Grow your soil! : harness the power of the soil food web to create your best garden ever / by Diane Miessler.

Description: [North Adams, Mass.] : Storey Publishing, 2020. | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Summary: Diane Miessler presents the science of soil health and shares the techniques she has used including cover crops, constant mulching, and compost tea to create and maintain rich, dark, crumbly soil thats teeming with life Provided by publisher.

Identifiers: LCCN 2019051715 (print) | LCCN 2019051716 (ebook) | ISBN 9781635862072 (paperback) | ISBN 9781635862089 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Soil management. | Soils. | Gardening.

Classification: LCC S591 .M65 2020 (print) | LCC S591 (ebook) | DDC 631.4dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019051715

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019051716

Dedication

To my amazing kids, Abe and Zoe, who grew up with my quirks and love me anyway.

To Jess and Nate, my bonus kids.

To Walter, who learned with me how to be happily married.

To my dad, who taught me most of what I know about gardening and about love.

To my grandkids Maggie, Linc, and Charlie, who make the world worth saving.

Acknowledgments

Id like to thank my family and friends who have been cheering me on for years, especially Linda Miessler, Glennda Chui, Beth Leydon, Katie McCamant, Catherine Allen, Mary Ann Johnston, Jeff Wright, and Molly Fisk.

And thank you to Tom Durkin for editing my rough draft and making it less incomprehensible. I couldnt have done it without you!

Contents

Foreword

By Elaine R. Ingham

Reading this book is such a joy. With Dianes guidance, gardening becomes an ongoing observation of the natural interactions between the many organisms that abound in a healthy garden. Theres so much to look for, experience, and comprehend. To Diane, gardening is an ongoing conversation held with your plants.

Dianes descriptions of the different groups of organisms in the garden made me smile and, on occasion, laugh out loud. This is the way science should be presented: as a perpetual discovery of the organisms that inhabit your soil and how best to handle them to help your plants grow. No more if it moves, kill it! That approach is too heavy-handed, too extreme. This book teaches you subtle management techniques for growing good food and beautiful landscapes.

Nature manages soil life very cleverly, with a minimum of fuss, muss, and mistakes. We need to understand how nature does this, and then work with nature. Its amazing how easy it is to grow any plant when you understand what it needs. Cooperation and networking are the dominant forces leading to greater productivity not destruction. Nuking your enemies diseases, pests, and parasites is not the way to exist. Down that road is a horrible future.

People who climbed on the toxic chemical wagon were told it was the only way to grow enough food to feed a starving world. That was a flat-out lie. People were also told that inorganic fertilizers and pesticides dont harm soil life when in fact, these toxins destroy nearly all the beneficial organisms in the soil and on plant surfaces. If youve damaged the life in your soil and on your plants, this book can help you replenish what is missing. Using the techniques Diane describes, you can grow equal or greater yields of highly nutritious foods with less cost.

You will learn how to work with nature to support beneficial organisms, so that if a not-so-wonderful creature like a disease, pest, or parasite comes looking for a place to hang out, it wont be able to find a comfortable spot and so will move on. These problem organisms are messengers from nature that something is wrong in your soil. Treat the cause, not the symptom dont kill the messenger!

Dianes humor and tongue-in-cheek joy make this book so fun to read. Over and over again, she revels in the downright silliness that occurs in the wilds of your garden, in your soil, and between some of the craziest critters you never knew existed. Let this book help you go on safari in your own wild kingdom, just beyond your back door. And if you dont yet have a garden worthy of going on safari in, then this book will help you build one teeming with the beneficial life that should be there.

If you understand how nature does things, you do not need toxic chemicals or inorganic fertilizers, nor do you need to be constantly disrupting the soil. Once you take the first step on the path to soil health, take a second step, a third, a fourth... This book can help lead you down that garden path, to a delightful place that promotes health and keeps your soil critters happy!

Beauty, Magic & Tomatoes

Why I Garden, and How the Soil Food Web Helps

My first gardening memory is of planting wrinkly gray seeds in orange juice cans with my dad (best dad EVER, by the way, and the likely source of my gardening bug).

I watched with a sort of proprietary amazement as those seeds sprouted into sturdy green shoots, and then grew into the plant that still emanates my favorite smell: sweet peas, in an exuberant mix of pinks, blues, and purples. I didnt know how wrinkly gray seeds could do that. I still dont; what I do know is that I still love making it happen.

I garden because gardening makes ugly places beautiful, grows food, and, perhaps most important, because plants amaze me.