Teaming with Microbes: The Organic Gardener's Guide to the Soil Food Web
Lowenfels, J. & Lewis, W. · 2010 · Timber Press
- Edition
- Revised
- ISBN
- 9781604691139
- Pages
- 220
- Tier
- Recommended
- Audience
- For intermediates
- Rating
- 3.5 / 5
Most plant-care writing treats the soil under a houseplant as a passive substrate — a holding medium for water, nutrients, and roots. Lowenfels and Lewis treat it as what it actually is: an ecosystem. Teaming with Microbes is the book that, more than any other at its level, gets that idea across to a non-specialist gardener without pretending the science is simpler than it is. It is also a book whose second half has aged badly and needs to be read with care.
What it argues
The argument runs in two halves. The first is a careful primer on the soil food web — bacteria, fungi, archaea, protozoa, nematodes, mites, springtails — and how the relationships between them, the plant roots, and the surrounding organic matter form a living system. The second half asks: if that is what the soil is, what should the gardener do? The answers — feed the system rather than dose it; favour compost and mulch over fertiliser; disturb the soil as little as possible — are mostly sound and mostly the point.
It is the bridging book between the older “soil as inert substrate” picture you’ll meet in Capon and the modern rhizosphere science that has reshaped the field since 2010. For a gardener already past the basics, it is the right next read.
Where it’s right
The primer chapters are excellent. The food web is laid out as a set of relationships rather than a list of organisms — what eats what, who exudes what, why fungi specialise where bacteria don’t, why the rhizosphere is a chemically distinct zone the plant actively shapes. The diagrams earn their pages; the writing assumes intelligence without assuming a degree.
The underlying message — that the gardener’s job is to feed the biology, not to dose it — is the correct one and is well argued. Compost and mulch as the central interventions, with no-till and minimal soil disturbance as the supporting practices, lands as conclusions of the ecology rather than as commandments handed down. That is the right relationship between science and prescription, and the book maintains it through the structural chapters at least.
The book is also right about the meta-point: that for two centuries the gardener has been encouraged to think about the soil only as a chemistry problem, and that the biology is at least as consequential. That correction matters and is well delivered.
Where it’s incomplete
Three real problems, in increasing order of severity.
Some of the chemistry is sloppy. A handful of pH explanations and ion-exchange descriptions are off enough to mislead a careful reader. It is fixable in a future edition and doesn’t undermine the ecology, but it is there.
The product talk has aged badly. The compost-tea chapters were already contested when the revised edition appeared and have not held up. The peer-reviewed work since 2010 — including a steady stream of careful field trials — consistently finds either no benefit or marginal benefit, and the cases where compost tea is recommended over straight compost are vanishingly few. The inoculant recommendations have the same problem: most commercially available microbial products do not measurably move the needle in a garden context, and some are simply repackaged compost. Linda Chalker-Scott (whose own book also sits on this shelf) has been the most patient critic of this section, and her summary is the one to read alongside this book.
The voice is wearing. A folksy, often repetitive register stretches the book across more pages than its argument needs. The reader who finishes it has earned the right to skim the later chapters.
How we’ll use it
We cite this book whenever we make the case that soil under a houseplant is a living system, not a chemistry — which we do often, because it is the single biggest reframe a houseplant keeper can make. We do not recommend its compost-tea sections, and where care advice on this site touches that territory we lean on more recent work.
The cleanest reading strategy: read the first half closely, treat the second half as a starting point and not a manual, and have How Plants Work (Chalker-Scott) within reach to check the parts about products.
Who should read it
Intermediate growers who already know the basics of light and watering and want to understand why their compost works. Beginners can skip it for now and come back. Specialists will already know the ecology and will be frustrated by the product chapters; they want the primary literature, not this.
The bottom line
A useful, honest book in its first half and a problematic one in its second. The ecology is right and the diagrams are good and the central reframe is exactly the one the gardener needs. The product talk is dated and overstated and should be read with a current source open. Worth its place on the shelf, with the caveats above.
Reviewed 2026-05-30. Edition: Revised (2010), Timber Press. ISBN: 9781604691139.
- · The first half is the clearest plain-English introduction to soil-food-web ecology in print: bacteria, fungi, archaea, protozoa, nematodes and arthropods explained with their actual roles rather than as a checklist.
- · The primer-then-prescription structure works — you learn the ecology, then you learn what it implies for compost, mulch, no-till and reading soil rather than dosing it.
- · Honest about the gardener's temptation to want a product to apply: the underlying message is that you grow soil biology by feeding it, not by buying it.
- · Fills the rhizosphere-shaped hole in Capon's primer — bridges the gap between 'soil as inert substrate' and modern microbiology in a way nothing else at this level does.
- · Diagrams of the food-web and the rhizosphere earn their place — they carry argument as well as decoration.
- · The compost-tea and inoculant chapters have aged badly. Peer-reviewed work since publication is consistently underwhelming on practical garden benefit, and Linda Chalker-Scott (whose own *How Plants Work* sits alongside this book on our shelf) has been one of the steadier critics.
- · Some chemistry and pH explanations are slightly off — readable, but you wouldn't quote from them.
- · The product-recommendation sections push specific commercial inoculants and brewing kits in ways the science doesn't unambiguously support.
- · A folksy, occasionally repetitive tone — a third of the book could be removed without loss, and the 'we' voice gets wearing across 220 pages.
- · US-centric and 15 years old: the field has moved on (rhizosphere genomics, microbial-network mapping) in ways the book doesn't address.