Another exciting package in the mail this week, and it’s this precious little soil DNA kit:

The DNA kit next to our ‘garden mushroom’, measuring the microclimate

I am testing this kit for a new project we are working on, together with Fiels4Ever, an initiative looking at the health of agricultural soils across the globe.

Soil health is best expressed through the diversity of microscopic organisms living in them, as this diversity is crucial to get your ecosystems to function. Agricultural fields, and our gardens for that matter, often host a much deprived soil microbial community. We want to know how bad it is.

The tiny things creeping and crawling through this soil will play a huge role in defining how good next years’ harvest is going to be

Thanks to SoilTemp, we have a global network of soil microclimate loggers. This provides perfect opportunity to collect the necessary background data on local climate conditions that Fields4Ever needs to run their health checks.

So we’ll scoop up some soil, send it back to our partners, and get a full overview of all (bacteria and fungi, that is) what is living in it. Cool, right?