A salt marsh may conjure up an image of a lovely sea of grasses, waving in the breeze, or the less lovely rotten-egg smell carried by those same breezes! Both are evidence of life highly adapted to stresses of marshes: tides that flood and drain them, high salinity, cyclical exposure to air at the soil surface. We will show how we measure the stressors in the marsh as well as how plants and microbes thrive there despite the challenging environment.