Tutorial Video: How to See Living Roots in the Microscope

If you have a microscope, you need to try this!

The best way to view soil life!

Last week I posted a soil life compilation video which took a few weeks to put together. I’m still planning to write a more detailed post about that process, but it’s going to take a little more time, because after I finished that project I got so into making videos I found myself making a living root tutorial, and now I’m behind on a bunch of other stuff. Whoops!

To be fair, I needed to make a bunch of slides for the fair next week anyway, so I thought why not just record the process and make a tutorial out of it? I’ve been wanting to make this tutorial for years!

I didn’t mean to get obsessed with this little side project and spend all week on it, but hopefully the video will be useful, inspiring, or at least somewhat interesting for someone out there. If nothing else, I’ve learned a lot about video editing!

This is also the first time I’ve published a video with my voice in it, and even speaking to the camera! So that felt like a bit of a milestone too.

Why living roots?

In my experience, this is the absolute best way to view a huge variety of soil life in the microscope. Since plants feed and form complex relationships with microbes, their roots and the soil around them is (sometimes quite literally) bursting with microbial life. The plants can live and grow on the slide for weeks or even months if you take good care of them, allowing us to watch over time as new roots, networks of fungal hyphae, and biofilms develop right before our eyes, totally undisturbed.

This process is super easy, and I love that you can just make one slide and look at it over and over again. They’re easy to transport too, for workshops or other demonstrations, so it’s possible to make demo slides in advance instead of on the spot. So much easier!

If you have a microscope, I can’t recommend this enough. Give it a try and let me know how it goes!

I hope you enjoy the video as much as I enjoyed making it. I would LOVE to make more of these, so if you have any suggestions or requests please let me know!

Thanks so much for being here!

Wish you all the best,

Kate