Thomas Ellington

Reading almost fifty papers on the pH balance in peat moss makes it feel refreshingly more remarkable and enjoyable. While I still start each morning with walk-through test plots, I am often knee-deep in research on heirloom varieties of wheat. If you happen to care for such things, my first research grant was to study the allelopathy of walnut trees. However, sometimes new science can develop just by coincidence while watching squirrels burying acorns around those same trees. Science lives in data; science lives in dirt.

A graduate student once adamantly proposed sterilizing all seed trays in our lab. "We have to rule things out," he would say sincerely without smiling. When he wasn't looking, I planted ours in unwashed garden soil passed down in the family. Our seedlings outgrew theirs by three weeks. Now, however, I purposefully add the benign microbes on the plant's leaf surfaces required by local plants into the greenhouse starts. One of the other ways I do it is to rub some native leaves between your palms before planting; the skin easily transfers the local fungi to your garden, and you can let biology do its thing.

Last fall, community volunteers met with me to map mycorrhizal networks under a city park. High school students took soil cores so they could track the hyphae. Watching their faces melt into shocked emotions as they viewed ecosystems hidden in plain sight beneath dandelions—priceless. I challenge you to try something similar. Press an old glass jar against the edge of your garden bed and probe sideways. You will witness complex partnerships of roots living with fungi that no textbook can describe. Email a picture of the jar you found to me, and we can compare how your beans negotiate with the clover in your garden. Sharing science will help it grow even more!