aerobic vs anaerobic soil. not even close to what you likely think.

This is a lecture. It has lots of technical chemistry terms. But watch it anyway because it will likely turn what you think you know about plants and soil upside down.

This is a great video Nick. Lots of information, explained very carefully.
John S
PDX OR

Okay, you've successfully sold me a new gardening book.

Take away just from this is no till in soils that can absorb water well. Cover crop and/or companion plant with legumes, brassicas, oats, and buckwheat. Irrigate consistently. And those bokashi composters might onto something exceptionally great. All these things can help plant absorb trace minerals to make them into SuperPlant for photosynthesis and disease resistance.

I have things to research.  Thankfully these are all perfectly manageable on a small scale like my home garden.

Anyone see anything obvious I missed in this lecture?

The book is coming in paper form and I will start working through the Kindle version.  Yes I bought a extra paper copy just to have a copy to add to the home library. Yes I am one of those people. First furniture I ever bought was a bookshelf.  Designer tip, real walls of books take more floor space than wallpaper but they make good thermal, block noise and provide generations of entertainment and education.

I love how he explained that it is not an on-off switch for aerobic or anaerobic.  There are all types of gradations between them, but only the facultative anaerobes or facultative aerobes have the microbes to fight disease.  Aerobic = good is too simple and not correct.  Also that we need our soils to be able to be resilient between them, because we experience drought, heavy rain, cold, hot and all conditions, so we need our soils to have the ability to adjust as well.  It made a lot of sense how he explained it, but I haven't heard this from anywhere else.
John S
PDX OR

this has been the most interesting and informative talk on soil plant interaction i have ever heard, it just ties in to obvious and in front of our face problems we see in farm soils yet are blind to it , i can see the look of disbelief in some friends faces already as i try to introduce them to this, brilliant ,thank you

John Kemf and Elaine Ingham will turn your world upside down lol. And they both openly declare that this is just scratching the surface on what is really going on in the soil.

Plants absorbing microorganisms they want, Deconstructing them, transporting their DNA to another part of the root zone, reconstructing them, and then expelling them alive back into the soil is like something out of a sci fi movie.

Interesting, thanks for posting!

Casie Becker wrote:

The book is coming in paper form and I will start working through the Kindle version.  Yes I bought a extra paper copy just to have a copy to add to the home library. Yes I am one of those people. First furniture I ever bought was a bookshelf.  Designer tip, real walls of books take more floor space than wallpaper but they make good thermal, block noise and provide generations of entertainment and education.

I am also one of those people - if I really like the e book then I will totally buy a ‘proper’ copy. And did not know about the noise reducing, insulating power of books. I’m all intrigued now. Currently living in a terraced house so lining all the walls with books to block out the neighbours sounds v appealing to me. Also, a v good excuse to buy more books 😂

I work at night and sleep during the day. I am not sure I'd be able to manage it if I couldn't sleep through some of the household ruckus.  I joke about it, but it is actually vitally important to the function of our household.

When I think of reducing agents the first thing that comes to mind is vitamin C. While I get that the goal is to have healthy soil that oscillates between being a reducing environment and an oxidizing one, foliar feeding of minerals was discussed in the video as a temporary fix for nutrient availability issues due to soil being overly oxidizing.

But what if you just watered in an ascorbic acid / potassium ascorbate solution (adjusted to appropriate pH)? Seems like that might be easier and cheaper than foliar feeding with minerals. *

Has this been studied?

* I'm not against foliar feeding with minerals, in fact I really like the idea - though as yet I've no direct experience (tomorrow I will try it myself for treating blossom end rot). I have suggested to the void of Twitter (no responses, no likes) foliar feeding of rice with molybdenum to try to reduce arsenic uptake into the grain. Don't know if it would work but it would be great if it did since in people with controlled Celiac (on GF diet, low tTG IgA titre), whole grain consumption is associated with an increase in neutrophil to lymphocyte ratio (N:L), meaning higher levels of inflammation.  This is opposite of what one would expect; I think it is likely the culprit is higher arsenic intake from whole grain rice since the GF diet tends to be high in rice if it contains grains at all (some opt for low carb or just eat tubers and fruits to be safe). High N:L is associated with poor health outcomes (& maybe not so coincidentally has to do with redox imbalance); lowering arsenic levels in rice would benefit the whole population.