Teaming with Microbes
The Organic Gardener's Guide to the Soil Food Web
Jeff Lowenfels & Wayne Lewis · Timber Press, 2010
The book that explains soil as a living system rather than a growing medium. The science transfers perfectly; the application chapters don't.
The compost tea chapter rests on a considerably weaker and more contested evidence base than the book's confident tone suggests — don't treat those claims as settled. The wider soil food web framework that underpins the book is also a subject of ongoing scientific debate rather than consensus. And it's now sixteen years old; sequencing-based understanding of soil communities has moved a long way since 2010.
What's actually in it
- Part 1: The Basic Science — twelve chapters, over half the book. What the soil food web is and why gardeners should care; classic soil science; then bacteria, archaea, fungi, algae and slime moulds, protozoa, nematodes, arthropods, earthworms, gastropods, and finally reptiles, mammals and birds.
- Part 2: Applying it — how the soil food web applies to gardening; assessing what your own soil food web looks like; tools for restoration and maintenance; compost; mulch; compost teas; mycorrhizal fungi; the lawn; maintaining trees, shrubs and perennials; growing annuals and vegetables; a simple soil food web garden calendar; and a closing chapter titled "No One Ever Fertilized an Old Growth Forest".
- An appendix distilling everything into a set of Soil Food Web Gardening Rules.
What it actually says
Specifics from inside the book — so you can judge whether it's telling you anything you don't already know.
- The single most useful idea, stated as its first three rules: some plants prefer fungally dominated soil and others bacterially dominated soil. Most vegetables, annuals and grasses want their nitrogen as nitrate and do best in bacterial soils; most trees, shrubs and perennials want ammonium and do best in fungal soils. That one distinction changes how you mulch and compost.
- The numbers behind it: forest soils carry ten times or more fungi than bacteria; agricultural soils run at 1:1 or less. Coarse, drier mulches push a soil fungal.
- A 19-rule appendix that distils the whole book — including always mixing endomycorrhizal fungi with seed at sowing or applying it to roots at transplanting, and following any chemical spray or soil drench with compost tea.
- A stated position against cultivation: rototilling severely damages the soil food web, and once a niche is destroyed the whole system works imperfectly. He arrives at broadly no-dig conclusions from an entirely different direction to Charles Dowding.
- Where other writers push back. Robert Pavlis has challenged the book's claims that synthetic fertilisers kill soil microbes, and that compost tea meaningfully raises soil microbe populations — his arithmetic puts a five-gallon pail of tea at roughly 400,000 bacteria per square foot, against soil already holding around two billion. Worth reading alongside.
Buy it if
You want to understand what compost and mulch are actually doing, and you're happy to read popular science to get there.
Don't buy it if
Anyone who just wants to be told what to put on their soil — you'll wade through twelve chapters on protozoa first.
Where it falls short
Beyond the US framing: no peat content at all, written for a market where the peat debate has nothing like its UK prominence. Soil chemistry is light — no pH management, no nutrient deficiency diagnosis. Nothing on clay or chalk as British gardeners meet them. No house plants. And nothing on no-dig as Charles Dowding defines it, though it arrives at similar conclusions by an entirely different route.
Who wrote it
Lowenfels read geology at Harvard, went to Harvard law school and practised as an attorney in Alaska before turning to horticulture — he is nicknamed "America's dirtiest lawyer". He has written a weekly garden column for the Anchorage Daily News since 1976, claimed as the longest running in North America, and founded the national Plant A Row for the Hungry programme. This matters for how you read the book: he is not a soil scientist. He is a lawyer and columnist popularising a framework developed by Dr Elaine Ingham — and several of the book's practical claims are disputed by other writers. We could verify almost nothing about co-author Wayne Lewis.
Where it was written
The most US-centric book on this shelf. USDA zones throughout, an entire chapter on American lawn culture, and a seasonal calendar calibrated to a continental climate — Lowenfels gardens in Anchorage, Alaska. The compost tea, inoculant and amendment products it discusses are often not sold in the UK or fall under different regulation.
The facts
- AuthorJeff Lowenfels & Wayne Lewis
- PublisherTimber Press
- Published2010
- EditionRevised edition
- FormatHardback, 220 pages
- ISBN-13
9781604691139 - LevelBeginner to intermediate
Checked against publisher listings, UK retailers and library records in August 2026. If any of this is wrong, tell us and we'll fix it.
Where to get it
Buying secondhand? Match the ISBN above — several books on this shelf have editions that look identical but aren't.