Teaming with Microbes made it clear that we have to make some major tweaks to our mulching and fertilizing campaign.  The horse manure and grass clippings we apply to our vegetable garden beds are perfect, but next year we should shred our tree leaves much more before applying them as a winter mulch.

On the other hand, I'm starting to rethink whether I should have applied horse manure to our fruit trees.  It sounds like heavy mulches of rotting wood chips or leaves are more likely to lead to the fungi dominated soil communities these trees prefer.  At least we didn't fall into the trap of trying to grow grass under our fruit trees --- a big no-no since grass prefers bacteria while trees prefer fungi.

This post is part of our Teaming With Microbes lunchtime series.  Read all of the entries: Teaming with microbes Fungi to bacteria ratio Chemistry of the fungi to bacteria ratio Different mulches for bacteria and fungi Tweaking our mulch campaign for microorganisms

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About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.



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