Soil is the key to healthy woodland

In one acre of a typical British woodland system there are:
• 110 tons of trees
• 1 lb of birds
• 21 lb of large animals
• ½ ton of plants
• 1½ tons of fungi
• 4½ lb of small mammals
• 500 lb of earthworms
• 9 lb of beetles
• 50 lb of spiders
• 90 lb of slugs & snails
• 4 tons of bacteria
• 340 lb of protozoa

Or: “Each shovel of soil holds more living things than all the human beings ever born.”

“Soils often have between 1,000,000 to 10,000,000 bacteria per gramme.”

“A teaspoon of forest soil may hold more than 10 miles of fungi and 1 gramme of garden soil can contain around one million fungi.”