What Is Soil?
“Healthy soil creates healthy plants, which in turn, create healthy people.”
If soil is life, what actually makes it soil?
At the most basic level, soil is made up of three particle types: sand, silt, and clay. These particles form based on the weathering of parent rock material over thousands of years. Each has different properties:
Sand is the largest particle — gritty, fast-draining, and low in nutrient-holding capacity.
Silt is medium in size — soft and smooth, retaining more water and nutrients than sand.
Clay is the smallest — sticky, heavy, and highly compactable, but able to hold the most nutrients due to its charged surface.
The ratio of these components determines a soil’s texture. The ideal growing soil—often called loam—contains a balanced mix of sand (around 40%), silt (around 40%), and clay (around 20%). This mixture allows for proper drainage, nutrient retention, aeration, and root penetration.
But texture alone does not make soil. A bucket of loam with no biological life in it is simply inert matter. Soil is not truly soil until it contains living microbiology, the billions of bacteria, fungi, protozoa, nematodes, arthropods, and other organisms that cycle nutrients, support plant health, and build the soil food web.
In this sense, soil is not just a thing, it is a living process. Its structure and fertility depend entirely on the presence and health of its biological community.
This is why organic regenerative gardeners do not use synthetic herbicides, pesticides, or chemical fertilizers. These products, which are often labeled as “conventional,” may temporarily feed a plant or annihilate a weed, but they do long-term damage to the living web beneath the surface.
Many herbicides and fungicides are biocides—plain and simply, they are designed to kill. When used in the soil, they don’t just kill pathogens. They disrupt entire microbial communities, reduce fungal populations, suppress nitrogen-fixing bacteria, and sever the very relationships that support plant health.
A regenerative approach understands that you cannot poison life into health. Soil that’s been routinely treated with chemicals is often biologically “dead,” even if its sand, silt, and clay proportions are perfect on paper.
To build true soil, the kind that feeds plants, resists drought, suppresses disease, and regenerates year after year, we must support its life, not suppress it. That means:
Feeding the soil with compost, mulch, and organic matter
Avoiding synthetic inputs that kill microbes or disrupt ecosystems
Protecting fungal networks by reducing or removing tillage
Maintaining cover to prevent erosion and desiccation (the process where soil loses its moisture and dries out, often leading to the formation of cracks).
Growing a diversity of plants to support a diversity of life
When we do these things, we stop seeing soil as a passive background and start understanding it as an active participant in the ecosystem. Healthy soil creates healthy plants. And healthy plants form the basis of healthy communities—ecologically and socially.
This is the kind of soil that traditional farmers knew how to build, often without ever seeing a microscope or reading a lab report. It’s also the kind of soil that modern regenerative growers are learning to recognize, restore, and protect, not just for crop yield, but for the sake of the Earth’s long-term fertility and resilience.
And beneath it all, quite literally, lies the forest floor model—a place where leaves decompose slowly, fungi thrive, and mycelial threads form vast underground networks, trading water, carbon, and chemical signals between plants and trees. This underground network, often called the Wood Wide Web, reminds us that soil is not just the stuff we plant in—it is the living connective tissue of life on land.
When we garden in ways that protect and support this living web, we are doing far more than growing food. We are participating in the regeneration of life itself, beginning from the ground up.