The best type of fertility you can provide for your fruit trees is ‘natural fertility’ that comes from building healthy soil full of organic matter, worms and microbes. In this article we explain how the natural fertility system works and has [...]

Nematodes have a bad reputation, mainly because in a system that is out of balance ‘bad’ nematodes (root-eating nematodes) can predominate and cause tremendous damage. The fact is there are way more ‘good’ nematodes than bad ones – you just ha [...]

In this article we give an overview of how your fruit trees get their nutrition throughout the year, so you’ll understand when to feed them, what to feed them, and why. Read the article in Summer - Week 7.

Also called Radium weed, Milkweed and Cancer weed, Petty spurge is an annual plant growing to 5– 30 cm tall, with smooth hairless stems. It’s native to most of Europe, northern Africa and western Asia, where it typically grows as a weed in far [...]

Spring is the time we need to be on the ball with nutrition, to make sure our trees have enough of what they need to produce fantastic fruit! Find the activity in Spring - Week 5.

Not the large cooking banana, but the extremely common herb found in gardens, lawns, and roadsides throughout Australia, Europe, and Asia, plantain is also called ribwort, narrow-leafed ribwort, flat weed, common plantain, and lamb’s tongue. I [...]

It’s important to have a diversity of soil organisms to create a healthy and functioning soil ecosystem. All the different types of animals play an important role in cycling nutrients (like carbon, nitrogen, sulphur and phosphorus) and returni [...]

In addition to the all-important micro-organisms (bacteria, fungi, nematodes, and protozoa), and our master soil-building friends the worms, soil also contains many types of larger bugs, called arthropods. There are thousands of different spec [...]

We regularly introduce you to one of your underground friends. This week we show you how they all fit together into an amazing, complex and intriguing world beneath your feet – the soil food web. Read the article in Summer - Week 3.

When growing fruit trees it’s vital to have good populations of fungi in the soil. Without adequate fungi trees will struggle to gain the nutrients required for good health. There’s plenty we can do to encourage good fungal growth—by looking a [...]

The very basis of growing great organic food is to have healthy soil, so in this article we introduce a few simple tests you can do at home—for little or no cost—to assess the state of health of your soil. This will help you get to know your s [...]

In this article we introduce soil bacteria, which are tiny single-celled organisms and by far the most numerous of all the soil microbes. A teaspoon of healthy soil can contain up to 3 billion bacteria—roughly equivalent in mass to 5 big dairy [...]