The USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) has identified four principles for improving soil health and sustainability: using plant diversity, managing soils more by disturbing them less, keeping plants growing throughout the year to feed the soil, keeping the soil covered as much as possible, and integrating livestock to recycle nutrients and increase plant diversity.
Soil health is crucial for sustaining essential functions such as water regulation, supporting plant and animal life, and reducing pollution. To improve soil health, farmers should use organic mulch, leave plant residue, and maximize biodiversity. Increasing diversity across operations can break disease cycles, stimulate plant growth, and provide habitat for beneficial organisms.
Management practices to improve soil health include reducing inversion tillage and soil traffic, increasing organic matter inputs, using cover crops, reducing pesticide use, rotating crops, and managing nutrients. Diverse crop rotations can reduce pests and diseases specific to certain plant species. Cover crops also improve soil structure and protect water quality by preventing nutrient run-off and leaching.
Soil organic carbon is crucial to maintain soil health and increase fertility. By farming using soil health principles and systems, such as no-till, cover cropping, and diverse rotations, more farmers are increasing their efforts to protect soil health and sustain life on Earth.
A healthy soil has good water infiltration and retention, as biological activity within the soil increases soil fertility and helps build good soil structure. Well-maintained soils provide good structure, water retention, and nutrient availability to crops. By incorporating these principles into agricultural and gardening practices, farmers can help protect their soil and ensure the continued health of their ecosystem.
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Look after your soil and your soil will look after you! Healthy soil means healthy plants and NOW is the time to show your soil some …
How can soil stability be improved?
Geotechnical engineering uses various techniques to improve soil stability and counter liquefaction, such as compaction, grading, slope modification, soil reinforcement, chemical stabilization, preloading, drainage improvement, lateral confinement, and advanced numerical modeling. These strategies are tailored to specific site conditions, ensuring optimal soil stability in geotechnical projects. The use of geosynthetics, dynamic compaction, vibrocompaction, lime or cement, and advanced numerical modeling further enhances soil stability.
Which is a way of maintaining soil?
Chemical-free methods for soil conservation and nutrient management include residue plowing, crop rotation, green manure cultivation, compost and manure application, and microbiological fertilizers. Integrated pest management (IPM) is a crucial framework for pest control without chemicals, aiming to prevent insects from feeding and reproducing while preserving ecosystem health. IPM strategies include soil solarization, crop rotation, biological control with antagonistic organisms, and organic agents.
Organic farming, however, faces challenges due to variations in soil types, terrain, and climate, making pesticide-based soil conservation methods unsuitable for all fields. Organic farming requires a more comprehensive approach to protect crops from pests and maintain ecosystem health.
How can we maintain the quality of soil?
Soil quality is crucial for good growth and abundant harvests. To improve soil quality, add humus, build and preserve humus, eliminate compaction, regulate pH value, use minerals, grow plants, and practice diverse crop rotation and mixed crops. Lime and quartz sand, charcoal, clay, and special plants can help improve garden soil. However, there are several ways to improve garden soil, including adding humus, building and preserving humus, eliminating compaction, regulating pH value, using minerals, growing plants, and incorporating diverse crop rotation and mixed crops. These methods can help each soil type and promote healthier soil conditions.
How do you bring soil back to life?
Leaf and Limb emphasizes the importance of healthy soil for trees and shrubs. They suggest avoiding NPK fertilizers, herbicides, and other harmful practices that can lead to dead dirt. Instead, they recommend using wood chips, compost, and mosquito sprays. Dead dirt is a result of overuse of chemicals and over-development, and plants cannot grow from it. To transform dead dirt into healthy soil, Leaf and Limb recommends following these seven simple steps:
- Remove dead dirt from the ground by removing leaves, being mindful of soil disturbance, using wood chips, compost, and mosquito sprays.
- Use compost instead of NPK fertilizers.
- Avoid spraying mosquitos.
How do you promote soil stability?
To improve aggregate stability, various management options can be employed, including retaining surface cover, minimizing tillage and traffic, increasing root and biological activity, and increasing exchangeable calcium. For dispersive clay and loamy textured soils, gypsum is traditionally used to increase calcium relative to other cations. Gypsum increases ionic concentration within the soil solution, which helps flocculate clay particles together, resulting in clearer water.
It also replaces dispersive cations with calcium, which can be overcome by applying gypsum at a rate of 2. 5-3t/ha. Soils most affected by slaking, dispersion, and crusts and hardset layers are typically clay and loamy textured soils. These soils are more susceptible to slaking, dispersion, and the development of crusts and hardset layers.
How can we control soil disease?
To prevent plant diseases, remove crop residue and low-quality plants, use soil solarization in warmer climates, and use heat, fumigants, fungicides, and seed treatments. Soil is a reservoir for many plant pathogens, and if inoculum levels are high and environmental conditions are favorable, susceptible plants will develop disease. To reduce soilborne pathogen levels, use appropriate treatments like heat, fumigants, fungicides, and seed treatments. Learn which pathogens attack the crop and regularly examine it for disease symptoms or signs. This is especially important in floriculture and ornamental nurseries to monitor for root diseases.
How can we improve soil health and fertility?
Soil fertility can be enhanced by incorporating cover crops that add organic matter to the soil, using green manure or legumes to fix nitrogen from the air through biological nitrogen fixation, using micro-dose fertilizer applications to replenish losses, and minimizing losses through leaching below the crop rooting zone through improved water and nutrient application. Nuclear and isotopic techniques, such as nitrogen-15 and phosphorous-32 isotopes, can be used to trace the movements of labelled nitrogen and phosphorous fertilizers in soils, crops, and water, providing quantitative data on fertilizer efficiency, movement, residual effects, and transformation. This information is crucial for designing improved fertilizer application strategies and identifying the origin and relative contribution of different crops to soil organic matter.
How can we make soil healthy?
To maintain healthy soil in your garden, test your soil, add organic matter, incorporate compost to compacted soil to increase air, water, and nutrients for plants, protect topsoil with mulch or cover crops, avoid using chemicals unless there’s no alternative, and rotate crops. Soil is more than just dirt; it’s a living ecosystem, a community of organisms linked through nutrient cycles and energy flows. To ensure a healthy garden, test your soil, use organic matter, protect topsoil with mulch or cover crops, and avoid using chemicals unless there’s no alternative.
How do you maintain soil health?
To maintain soil health, use diverse nutrient sources like manure and compost. However, using compost or manure alone can lead to excessive phosphorus levels. A crop rotation can balance nitrogen and phosphorus inputs by combining modest manure or compost additions with additional nitrogen inputs from legume cover or forage crops. Maintaining residue on the soil surface helps suppress weeds, conserve moisture, and provide habitat for insect predators.
How can we restore the soil health?
Soil health restoration is crucial for sustainable agriculture and environmental health. To achieve this, farmers and environmentalists are exploring various strategies and techniques to enhance soil fertility, boost plant growth, and promote overall health. These include reducing tillage practices, implementing crop rotation or cover cropping, applying biochar as a soil amendment, adding soil microbes, improving water management, and combating soil erosion.
Soil profile, soil carbon, water and nutrient retention, microbial activity, and the use of biochar are all important factors to consider. Reduced tillage, also known as conservation tillage or no-till farming, involves minimizing or eliminating traditional plowing and cultivation of soil between crop seasons.
How can we take care of soil?
To maintain healthy soil in your garden, test your soil, add organic matter, incorporate compost to compacted soil to increase air, water, and nutrients for plants, protect topsoil with mulch or cover crops, avoid using chemicals unless there’s no alternative, and rotate crops. Soil is more than just dirt; it’s a living ecosystem, a community of organisms linked through nutrient cycles and energy flows. To ensure a healthy garden, test your soil, use organic matter, protect topsoil with mulch or cover crops, and avoid using chemicals unless there’s no alternative.
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1. Use Dynamic Accumulators 2. Compost, Compost, Compost 3. Mulch 4. Cover Crop 5. Use Chickens! There are MANY more …
I just have to say THANK YOU Ben for providing me with much-needed therapy! You are cheerful and sweet and just what we need now in this crazy, often mean-spirited, self-absorbed world. If I’ve had a day full of mean and nasties, I just come home from work and soak in your kindness and warmth. My garden thanks you too for your inspiring ideas.
This was my 3rd year on my sandy garden (re-claimed lake bed). Each year I’ve increased my production of homemade compost and leaf mold, and this year I was able to cover almost all my garden beds with one or the other! It’s exciting! The soil had almost no nutrients in 2019, but it’s gotten better each year.
Great ideas! I used to amend my garden beds mostly with bagged chicken and steer manure because it was the cheapest way to do so when I first got into gardening. Now I have multiple compost bins and a large trash can filled with leaf mold so I don’t have to buy compost very often anymore. I try to feed my soil from a variety of sources in the hopes of providing many different nutrients for diverse soil life. Home made compost, leaf mold and glass clippings are my most commonly used amendments, and I don’t do any tilling – I just set it on top and let the soil life work it in over time.
the “lasagna garden” concept really does work …. just layer in grass clippings, leaves, kitchen scraps, cardboard, wood chips, etc. all winter and by planting time, you’ll have lovely, plant-ready soil. I have been throwing a bag or three of commercial soil (bought at Lowe’s) on top as extra insurance, but I really don’t think I need do that anymore. I’m going to try going without next May. Thank you for another informative and fun article!
Raised rows with mulch in the valleys and compost tea will give you more harvest per square foot than you can handle. I was hired to build a garden for a botanist that was responsible for tripling the yield of the community garden and that was how she designed it. Simply and effective. I used the method to grow some outrageous outdoor oregon reefer 😎
The compost pits have been the best method for me since I live in town and have close proximity to my neighbors. Its worked wonderfully for me and it doesn’t smell or attract vermin. In the warmer months especially if I dig it back up a month later theres almost no evidence that I ever put anything there.
I live in dry hot Southern California. It’s awful. Very urban. I have 1 deciduous tree. A solitary silver maple. I blow the fallen leaves down my driveway and into the veg patch weekly. The chickens stir it up and I water as normal all winter to support life in it. I don’t let it sit naked that’s fo’ sho’. LOVE your website. Sooo helpful and achievable.
At last! My heart is warmed 🔥 by someone talking about the importance of the health of soil. It’s our very body, what feeds and grows us. Sequesters carbon dioxide and stores water. If we could all get our governments to truly understand the critical need for healthy soil, our climate and our health would improve 🙏🏼 Yay 🎉for Ben 🫶🏼
I’m fortunate to live near the sea, so I harvest seaweed that’s washed up on the beach. Leave it out in the rain for a couple of weeks to wash off any excess salt, then chop it up with a lawnmower, together with dried leaves, grass clippings, shredded cardboard or anything similar. Makes a great mulch.
Bed I use we rotted horse manure and chopped leaf mulch which I leave for a year. Also home made compost I make at the alloment. One I like to say bed about woodchip you carnt put pine chippings in beds as it will stop growth of things you plant pi e has within its self to stop anything growing. Any other chippings are fine. Great vid always look forward to the next one all the best.
This year I have tilled everything into the garden. Then we added a layer of mown leaves and I tilled them in. Now we are adding another layer of the mown leaves as a cover. This way they are not too thick to till in when spring cones. Our Niece raises show rabbits and once a month I get her rabbit poop All winter long I add another layer of rabbit poop over the leaves, often between layers of snow, eventually covering the whole garden. Which when the snow melts and Spring comes i till it in with the compost from our bins. All summer long I use grass clippings as a mulch so that is some of what I tilled in this fall
First, I enjoy these articles very much. This particular one on soil management was very informative. If you don’t mind, I’d like to emphasize the importance which adding composted organic matter to garden soil has on improving soil texture and soil structure. This enhancement improves water retention and increases the ability of the soil matrix to adsorb and retain essential nutrients in the proximity of the plants root zone. Anyway, I wanted to share this tidbit of information while giving thanks to the makers of their articles.
I had to go out and put fleece on my broad beans this morning as the frost was so heavy here in S France. I was a little unsure re the green manure and sowed rye and buckwheat they may be a bit of a tough crop for my beds to get rid of! I have sown some mustard (for bio fumigation) and planted turnip within it, hoping to plant potato crops later and will try tansetifolia on the legume bed, maybe in January! I am totally envying your cavello nero as i tried to grow it and it didn’t appear – thinking of trying it in January under cloches we will build as soon as we can before it gets too warm. Have broccoli though and some old cabbage!
I use a multi- variety of green crops to tide my garden spots over winter. I cover seed with annual ryegrass, ladino clover, vetch, and buckwheat. The ryegrass overcovers the ground and holds the other seeds in place over the winter. Then the blossoms of the buckwheat, clover, and vetch go crazy in early spring, and the wild bees, butterflies, and mothbutterflies go crazy around it for a few weeks before I till it all under before the vetch makes mature seeds. It really improves the soil.Thanks!
I lay down compost I make in November and cover with landscape material. No tilling I just use a pitch fork to aerate the soil. In the early spring I lay down shredded leaves that have been composting all winter. I grow microorganisms in a bucket and drench the soil. And cover again and let it sit for a couple of weeks until planting. This my second year doing this. Last years crop was the best ever. And it will only get better. Starting Bokashi this year and will be incorporating that also……
I use grass clippings as mulch to conserve water and later work it in in the fall along with any compost or other amendments available. Normally throw down a lime treatment due to acidic clay soil. Use a rotary mower to chop up any remaining vegetation. Worm castings and bags of composted manure go into the seedbed row along with fish fertilizer type products during spring planting.
Covering my earth bed with cardboard first, then shredded leaves. First time trying this method. 😬🤞🏼My bed has thrived the past several years with me doing absolutely nothing. 😆 Bare soil overwinter, never fertilizing, never amending. I’m having so much fun being out in the garden, and sourcing materials. I’m so nervous. It feels like I’m trying to fix something that isn’t broken, possibly messing up a good thing. 🥺 The only issue I’ve ever had with this bed is all the weeds and grasses, which is why I’m covering the bed this year…in hopes of drastically reducing weeds next season. The space under my peach and cherry tree, I’m going to cover with a thick layer of wood chips. My wood chips are definitely only single shredded, but I’m not complaining! They were free from a wood chip drop my friends and I shared.
I dump stall cleanings (from the horse, goats, and chickens) directly onto the garden all winter long, stopping in early March. The heavy rains in our Maritime climate (helped by chickens foraging through the garden in winter) break everything down so it’s ready for planting in Spring. I make sure to include stall bedding (urine-soaked wood pulp) as well as manure. The native soil here is gravel-over-clay, so amending it is vital to even move a shovel around in it.
20 years ago, we rented an old Victorian monstrosity in Portland OR. You could see places where outbuildings had been 150 years ago, but one such outline was the only really tomato-worthy place for sun. I got the soil tested, and it came back as contaminated with heavy metals. Apparently, 150 years ago, what they used for horses for colic or worming or something was mercury compounds (they sold such as “patent medicines” for humans at the time, too). The sunny patch had been the corral for the stables. I was very sad at the state of the soil. To sow in it, or even above it in a raised bed, it would require excavating and removing a meter down. I didn’t have a garden there, except containers. Sometimes you can’t build on a bad foundation of soil at all.
In addition to adding homemade compost in the spring and fall, I have been burying leafy veg and a bit of straw in the beds to help feed the worms living in our beds. I just push a small handful down into the loose soil to a depth of about 6 inches periodically here and there randomly throughout the beds. Now we find worms whenever we dig up potatoes, sweet potatoes, etc. We don’t buy worm castings, because our beds are basically vermicompost bins themselves.
Hello Ben, Thank you for your reply, I will get outside and begin work as soon as I can. All my friends adore Rosy, she is beautiful and appears to be a real companion to you. My husband passed away this time last year and I feel lost without him. I have been considering buying a dog to give me a focus now. I have read just about everything I can on the Cavapoo and the breed is a serious contender. If there is anything you can tell me about them that you have discovered since getting Rosy, it would be very much appreciated. Thank you for all of the valuable information and enjoyment that your articles have brought this past year and I wish you and your family a happy, healthy Christmas and New year. Regards Wendy
Subbed, I have fun going mad scientist at this time of year using a variety of soil amendments chicken manure in certain parts of the garden, steer manure, also my own unfinished compost which I bury. And I do have sticks, sticking up in my garden too so I don’t forget where my unfinished compost was, ha ha. I won’t be using the spots for 5 months but I like to dig the area up in the spring to see if anything is left after the decomposition process. Oh what I wouldn’t give to see it all happening under the soil.
Hey Ben! 👋 For a number of years I have planted my winter squash and melons over a pumpkin pit…putting all those veggie scraps and even fish in the bottom of the hole. Here in the US we make the pit right before planting. The plants really love it.🙂 I also compost in place in my containers before planting.🙂
Some great ideas. Going to try the broad beans method. Started collecting leaves last year.. how long does it take to break down? I got this years batch ready too. I’ll try the trench way too as both my compost bins are full already and I’ve got lots more to compost. Look forward to your future articles. Thank you.
Hello Ben, I am so pleased I contacted you about Rosy. You can’t beat personal experience when you’re trying to reach such an important decision. I started my weeding yesterday but rain drove me in but I’ve been saving all my good cardboard for the next step. The weather in Suffolk has been one of extremes but I have never had so much chickweed in my veg plot. I’ve had just about every mite, rust, fly and tree bug known to gardeners and l lost almost all fruit from my plum, apple and pear trees. I’m trying everything I can to get better crops next season. I will not let them get the better of me. Christmas wishes to you and your family. Regards Wendy
I have had sucess adding lobster and shrimp shells, cleaned of sauces of course.dried them and gave amix of grinded down for fast decomposition and bigger chucks for longerdecomp. Fish heads under tomatoes ect.. works well. If unavailable could use sardines in water or of the sort as long as it is marine based….in water. Crab shells works too. Using leaves is the best start. By using your environment and perpetuating it you add to it’s permaculture. Adding other ammandements is but the cherry on the sundae! Always keep in mind what you want to grow and where and ammand all you want! Good expérimentation my fellow gardeners. It is key for production and longivity!
You mentioned wood chips don’t rob the soil of nitrogen, I was told not to use sawdust from the sawmill for the same reason. Can you confirm this? I picked up a trailer load and have been composting my yard and kitchen scraps with it. It has reduced from seven cubic yards to about half even as I have been adding materials. I got it about seven months ago.
Hello Ben, Can you advise me, if I need to remove all the weeds from my veggie plot prior to mulching with compost, leaves etc. I have some small green leaf weeds that have arrived and have spread a little. Some appear to have a root going from one to the next slightly under the soil and I think there is also chick weed. Also, can you tell me what breed of dog little rosy is? Best wishes Wendy
Thank you Ben, I have just found this website.. I am in a bit of a pickle, I live in Australia, and I’ve just moved to a cute cottage in the blue mountains 10 days ago, courtesy of a friend asking if i wanted to rent her house, the back yard is big but although established and fruit trees, some citrus, mainly lemon trees and i think a cumquot, there’s also a plum tree but it’s only go 3 branches still alive, it’s covered in lichen and usnea and not looking good at all, i am going to try saving it..cut back all the dead branches, take the huge amount of tall grass and other weeds from around it, it’s smothered as is everything else in the garden and vege patches etc..but the problem is i want to start growing vegies now, but the soil is really dead..is there any way to get the soil good enough and quickly, and to be able to plant now? I am in dire need of growing as Australia is the second most expensive country to live in, and I’m struggling to make ends meet. eg: I bought 2 capsicums, a small bunch of coriander, 1 Spanish onion, 3 mandarins, 3 bananas, a 2ltr milk and a small tub of sour cream and it cost me over $30 ! Our dollar is worth about 40 cents if not less..and for 500grams of beef mince it’s 12-15 dollars, sometimes more, bread is anywhere from minimum $5 to $12, and eggs..well i won’t go on. Suffice it to say..i need to grow and asap, I’m hoping there’s a way that will produce some reasonable veggies to eat, i know they’ll not be a packed full of nutrients etc but it’s crucial to grow some.
We have heavy clay soil that I have added at least a foot of leaves to every fall for the past 8 years along with a little manure for 2 years. The garden is full of earth worms, and it keeps the weeds down. However, the summers are hot and the garden dries out and becomes hard like concrete until the fall rains. The soil never seems to become lighter for better working. Do you have any suggestions? In a past location, I added much more manure that lightened that soil. Maybe it would do the same here?
Hi Ben! I LOVE your articles and how well you explain things – for even the slowest of us!! 🙄Question for you tho about the field beans as a cover crop at 6 minutes…. suggested because ‘they fix nitrogen from the air at their roots’ BUT you say to cut them down before they produce flowers or beans because they’ll use that nitrogen up themselves? So my question is about garden peas or green beans… both supposed to be nitrogen building crops for the soil BUT do they as well use up the nitrogen if they’re allowed to produce the peas and green beans?? After all, that’s why we plant them… right?! 😁
I have acces to horse manure, it’s just sold at the Sid of the road/house, in the next village. If I put that in with a lot of carbon rich stuff will it break down into compost? I seem to have a lot of carbon stuff from my nans hedge we cut down a few months back but now I don’t have anything high in nitrogen as I don’t put food waste in as we got mice it it the first time we did that, never again my mum said. She’s 100% petrified of them bless her, I wasn’t keen either So now I’m stuck as to what to put in. I don’t really want to put chicken manure pellets in, I do have alot as I got given lots lol so could use them. ?? Please give me some advice
I’m not sure if it was the fact you just haul manure in your car “this really is the shi+ comment,” or Rosie’s semi interested look, then sniff, and final walk off shaking her head as if to say, “um…yeah, no, not for me.” and “What in the name of Charles Dowding are you dumping in my garden Man!” when you dumped the kitchen scraps bin in the hole. LOL. Love it Rosie!
Help help. About a couple of weeks ago l plant salad onions in to the ground and blow me down with a father the slugs eaten them. So l have put second lot in seed trays they have germated. My question is can they stay in the trys until spring or will l need to put them in my veg bed? It is now November 2nd is it too late to do this?
Great article Ben! I had to rewind it 2 mins in just to be sure i heard you right! lol 😂 Was literally what i was thinking when it comes to using animal poo! lol I am new to cover crops this year. I bought some Green Manure (Rye and Vetch) as i didn’t know what to plant. It’s about 10cm\\ 4inchs at the moment. Maybe next year i can try the kale and beans.
I have a small empty bed in my garden that I am waiting till the spring to plant flowers in. At the moment, I have removed the weeds that had started to grow in it and covered it with empty compost bags (weighed down with large beach stones) because we have a problem with cats pooping in our garden and they like nice soft, worked soil to poop in. I have started to collect leaves…if I covered the bed with leaves and then put the compost bags on top of the leaves (to stop the cats), would that work, or do the leaves need to be open to the air? I would chop them all up as small as I could manage first of course.
I live in New Brunswick,Canada in zone 5b. I started gardening a little over a year ago and was planning on planting peas and beans next summer in the original garden plot my hubby planted a few years back in order to add some nitrogen to the soil.So you are saying if you let the plants fruit there is no nitrogen benefit? Hubby doesn’t like beans and peas tend to produce a relatively small amount so it is not a big deal to cut them before they fruit, but I hadn’t heard about that concept before. So you cut them back just as the first flower appears or sooner?
Someone tell me if this isn’t the right way to go about this but I laid down some cardboard in august and most of what was underneath (grass and some weeds) have died back. Lots of earthworms under there! The cardboard was aging so I added some new cardboard to what was exposed (to continue to kill the grasses underneath) but then put some fallen leaves on top. Is this too much layering? It just snowed here in southwest MI and am wondering if the leaves will continue to die/rot into the spring? Or, could I use it as a mulch next year around my plants?
Every time a gardener claims that the ground is always covered in nature, I want to fly them over half of the western US. Rock, sand, rock, dirt, sand, repeat. There is SO much barren land in this world. Check out northern Africa or the majority of the Middle East sometime. Etc, etc. I get the point about covering the earth, but exposed soil is definitely not a “Never in nature” (other gardeners have been far more adamant).
Epa and Scientists spraying pesticides over entire states and herbicides and putting cricket eggs in the ground and locust eggs chopping down trees by the river and creeks spraying herbicides on private property and public property and native American toorganic wild mushrooms and everything is getting ruined in my. And wy.
A narcissistic personality is someone who is lob sided off balance and out of context, a saint is also someone lob sided off balance and out of context so neither will have logic that’s relevant. Creating healthy well balanced human beings is not something this world is focused on at all, the reason is because unhealthy people are extremely profitable. Do not question the motives of the tools, question the motives of the individuals using the tools, they are the most likely people to display such a detrimental imbalance in their personality, they are also the only people able to control the world view of the people beneath them. So ensuring you do not end up in the wrong hands is everything if you do not want to have your world view dictated to you by someone else’s hidden agenda. All one needs to know in such situations is that tools are compromised and the people who used those tools are detrimental and off balance so stay clear of both to the best of you ability with in reason. know what your dealing with before you make assumptions and decisions, at least that way the people doing such things are more likely to expose themselves during that time. kmt