About
I'm John, and I look at soil under a microscope for a living.
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When I was figuring out what to do with my life, I knew I wanted my work to give something back to the planet. Not offset it, not minimise the damage, actually give back. And once I started looking into soil, the answer was obvious. There's no better way to give back to the Earth than working with the soil itself. It's the foundation everything else grows from, literally and otherwise.
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So I trained in soil biology, and for years I worked with farmers and growers across NSW, doing soil microscopy assessments and helping people figure out why their land wasn't performing the way it should. And I kept seeing the same thing, over and over.
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People doing everything right. Good watering, good fertiliser, good intentions. And still getting plants that wouldn't take off.
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The soil looked fine on top. But under the microscope, the biology that's supposed to be doing the work, the bacteria and fungi that feed plants and build healthy soil, just wasn't there. Or there wasn't enough of it.
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That's the gap. Not effort. Not knowledge. Biology.
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The bigger picture​
The more soil I looked at, the more I started thinking about scale. One garden at a time, one consult at a time, is good work. But there's a lot of soil out there that needs biology back in it, and not everyone can have me out with a microscope and compost extract.
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What if there was a way to get that same biology into as much soil as possible, as simply as possible. Backyard pots, raised beds, struggling garden beds, all of it.
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That's RootWise Balance. The same biology that makes compost work, including some of it compost can't deliver, in a teaspoon you add to your watering can. No compost pile. No mess. Just the biology your soil needs to start functioning again.
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If enough people are doing that in their own backyards, that's a lot of soil coming back to life. That's the goal I started with, just at a scale I couldn't have done on my own.
Where this comes from
I trained through Dr Elaine Ingham's Soil Food Web School and have spent years doing field work and microscopy assessments for growers across the Northern Rivers.
RootWise Balance isn't a product I came up with first and tried to find a problem for. It came directly out of what I was seeing in soil samples, again and again, for real people with real gardens.
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If you want to go deeper into the science behind it,
If you just want to get started,