A single handful of healthy garden soil contains more living organisms than there are people on the planet.
Bacteria, fungi, protozoa, nematodes, mites, springtails, earthworms — an entire ecosystem operating beneath your feet, largely invisible and almost entirely ignored by conventional gardening advice.
This isn't trivia. What's happening in your soil determines almost everything above it:
— How well your plants grow
— How effectively your garden handles drought and flood
— How much maintenance you'll need
— How resilient the whole system is to stress
The most remarkable feature is the mycorrhizal network — a web of fungal threads connecting plant roots to each other and to nutrients they couldn't reach alone. Over 90% of plant species form these relationships. The plant provides carbon, the fungus provides phosphorus, nitrogen, water, and trace minerals from soil far beyond what the roots could reach independently.
In drought conditions — increasingly relevant in Surrey summers — these networks can be the difference between a plant that copes and one that fails.
And the most common ways we damage this system? Unnecessary digging, chemical overuse, compaction, and paving over everything.
The soil beneath your garden isn't dirt. It's infrastructure.
Full article on our Hub: montrose-landscapes.com/greens-and-blooms/post/whats-happening-under-your-lawn-soil-science
📍 Surrey
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