What does Plants Dig Soil™ mean?

One day as I was thinking about the five soil health principles it came to me that really it all came down to plants. Obviously, keeping a living root in the ground and having a diversity of plants involves them.

Keeping the soil covered still involves them because it’s their dead material that does the job. Minimizing disturbance is a practice that enables them to grow.

Integrating animals may seem not to involve them but without plants the animals have no reason to be there. The plants provide the food. Some will argue that soils are healthier with animals integrated than those soils without them. I argue that animals will help speed the process up, but they don’t inherently add to the soil. If they are not there other creatures and microbes will eventually cycle the plant materials. It’s all about the time scale you are looking at.

You may argue that the soil life is what truly builds the soil. They do the work but who feeds them? The plants do this of course!

Plants are the energy source for the entire system. They make energy bundles - sugar - from sunlight and carbon dioxide. This energy is what powers the growth of the plant. Much of it respires right back into the atmosphere as the plant builds structures. Some of it is incorporated into the structure of the plant using the minerals it pumps from the soil. The dead plant material becomes the food for the soil fauna and microbes.

Curiously, much of the sugars that the plant produced can be pumped out of the roots to feed the microorganisms. It was once thought they were “leaky” but in fact they do this for a reason. They work hard to have the microbes that they want around their roots. In the case of mycorrhizal fungi they let them connect directly to the roots and give them sugars in exchange for minerals that the fungi have access to.

So where did the name come from? Like many great ideas - it just came to mind. Unlike many ideas I was actively thinking of a name and finally this idea came. I liked the play on words that “dig” brings in. When someone “digs” you, they think you’re cool. “Digs” can mean the place you live. “Dig” can mean physically digging the soil, and when you think of what roots do, they do just that: they move the soil around.

Aesthetically, I liked how I could stack Plants over top of Dig Soil and make a perfect rectangle. Plants on top and soil below plays on how they look in nature. A search of domain names quickly showed it was available and a search of company names in my province again showed it available. I immediately purchased the domain and soon registered the company. The rest, as they say, is history.

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