Hand-labeled soil cores, each read at two depths and returned to its field map.
field intelligence from below
the ground isalready inconversation.
Understory follows the fungal, mineral, and microbial exchanges that make a field resilient. We work beside growers and watershed stewards to notice what conventional soil tests leave out.
scroll to feed the network
live field model / 22.06
001active connections
new growth
what we notice
soil is a community, not a substrate.
A teaspoon of well-structured soil contains a crowded commons: bacteria passing nutrients across root zones, fungal threads bridging dry gaps, and pores that hold yesterday’s rain long enough for a seedling to use it.
Our field teams pair microscopy with farmer memory. We collect a spadeful, then ask where the water lingered, which hedgerow was cleared, and where the clover stopped returning.
“A result becomes useful when it changes what someone tries in the next season.”
what our field ledger holds
Observations gathered across four ongoing landscape partnerships. These are working records, not performance claims.
Small excavations that let us trace roots without treating them as invisible.
Shared across orchards, market gardens, hay fields, and one municipal meadow.
Archived with field notes, host plant, moisture history, and a living keeper.
current work
three places, long attention.
We take on slow questions with people who can stay with an answer through more than one growing season.
the apple root exchange
In a wind-exposed Hardanger orchard, we are tracking whether wood-chip lanes and perennial understory restore the fine fungal connections lost to decades of bare-soil mowing.
peat at the edge of the ditch
With a local catchment group, we are measuring the small shifts in moisture, mycelial density, and rush cover after old drainage cuts are softened—not sealed.
compost is a beginning
At an intensive vegetable garden outside Oslo, we map the gap between compost application and actual root access: pore space, fungal partners, and the timing of irrigation all matter.
field instrument / 04
read a core by hand.
A laboratory number gives a depth. A field core gives a sequence. Choose a stratum to open a note from the kind of ground we work in.
waiting for a reading
Choose a depth in the specimen to see what changes there.
core 18-B / north slopetouch to probe
01—04 · select a layer; the last reading stays with the record.
our practice
make room for what is small.
We combine laboratory care with field methods that leave a place legible to the people who tend it after we leave.
walk the question
Begin with a slow transect and the stories already attached to a field: compacted gateways, forgotten springs, reliable patches of self-seeded clover.
sample without flattening
Pair basic chemistry with aggregate structure, roots, scent, moisture, and local weather notes. A spreadsheet is useful; it is never the whole site.
return a usable map
We meet at the field edge with drawings and jars, then make a next-season experiment that fits the labour, tools, and risk the grower actually has.
work with us
bring us a stubborn patch of ground.
We are accepting two new long-form research partnerships for the 2027 field season. Start with a note about your place, your question, and the changes you have already noticed.