Build resilience and soil vitality through plant variety

The value that vital soil brings to a space impacts way beyond what the eye can see.

Vital soil drives health through all plants, people and creatures which touch, live and eat from it. Growing and encouraging a vital soil is not only good for you, it is a legacy for all who encounter it. Join me on this educational journey and let’s grow vital soil in each and every patch!

Before we talk about plant variety, let’s talk about how soil and plants interact.

Well, soil vitality is all that microbial activity beneath our feet, whilst plant activity is photosynthetic. Plants are capturing sunlight energy every day and translocate this into the ground using their root systems, and turn it into the form of sugars and carbohydrates.

All that soil microbial activity is heavily reliant on that as a food source. At the same time the plant is heavily reliant on the delivery nutrients to its root system via microbial activity, bacteria if it’s a very fleshy plant, and fungi if it’s more a tree. And they bring different nutrients to that sphere, to the rhizosphere, and in doing that the plant uses those nutrients to grow, and similarly the microbial activity use the sugars and photosynthates to reproduce and grow as well. A fantastic symbiotic relationship!

However, not all plants deliver and need the same things. So they don’t deliver the same type of photosynthates, and they don’t all need the same types of nutrition. For microbial, the same thing occurs, different microbes bring different nutrients, and need different things as a consequence in the way of enzymes and hormones. So guess what – diversity is king!

In a diverse environment, where everything is changing, where there’s a multiplicity of organisms, you will have more resilience in extreme conditions, giving plants ability to cope if it turns dry, or in really cold weather… that microbial consistency will be able to adapt and incorporate.

So how do you make a vital soil diverse?

After all, diversity is king. What you can do is grow a whole range of plants on your patch. Don’t just plant one type of carrot, plant three. Make sure you’ve got annuals planted underneath your trees, or get some native grass plugs and put them in your European lawn.

Diversity is king, and to enable that to happen you need to have lots of different types of plants. That creates that soil vitality.

So go on. I challenge you, I dare you… grow vital soil on your patch and do so by planting all different types of plants, everywhere.