This pages pokes fun at marketing hype with a silly poem

Soil - starts in the roots

Some thirty five years ago I was trying to convert my horrible heavy clay into decent soil. I noticed that the clay around the roots of certain plants was converted to a beautiful loam – but I had no idea why.

Since then I have learned that certain plants will exude chemicals to attract specific biology which does this magic conversion.

With a better understanding of the mechanism I thought I would try growing this magic biology and see if people were interested in buying it.

I am not a marketing type so approached a couple of marketing companies saying I wanted to sell yukky black dirt full of creepy crawlies. They both knocked me back. So I in a moment of passion I wrote up this little ditty. I hope you find it amusing and if you are interested please get in touch – I would love some feedback on my latest obsession.

We sell dirt and it is pretty useless

Yes we sell dirt and to be honest it is pretty useless.

But it is home to our family and friends - trillions and trillions of tiny creatures - and we love them dearly because they can turn dead stuff into the very best food that grow the very best plants that make us healthy.

We love the fungi because they can dissolve the hardest of rocks and dead wood and turn it into plant food full of trace elements which keep us healthy. We love the bacteria because they breed so fast and we love the worms because they make holes all over through the dirt. But in our family there are thousands of different species – all doing their own thing for the benefit of the family.

We love them all because they turn dirt into soil.

We love them so much we really look after them well – we feed them and water them and if we could we would tuck them up in bed each night and tell them a story but there are so many of them we would not get any sleep ourselves.

In our loving care they can enjoy doing what they really like doing – eating and having sex – which means an awful lot of babies.

If you buy our dirt - and feed and water our little darlings - they will turn your dirt into beautiful rich soil so you can grow healthy plants that will make you healthy.

If you want to learn more about our little darlings there is so much to read – just go to www.waterright.com.au where we have created a suggested a reading list from our massive library.

If you want to buy our dirt or just talk to us you email us and we can give advice on how you look after our little darlings – we want them all to go to a good home with loving parents.

Action plan

So what am I going to do about this? Well I am not going to totally ignore the marketing gurus but;-

- I am not going to put my creepy crawlies in pretty boxes
- neither am I going to spend the many thousands of dollars they quoted me to productise my creepy crawlies
- I actually think there are people out there who are willing to spend their time reading and learning about soil
- I accept that it has been difficult to find the key information on my web.

So I am going to use my web site to explain how soil actually works and how people can create their own healthy soil.

This will look at parent soils which are the starting point and the strategies needed to turn these into these into quality soils with the properties you need.

If you just want to buy a trial pack they costs $47 and weighs 5Kg but please read the instructions on how to look after them first (email me for a copy) – we want our little darling to be happy.

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