Urban planning is undergoing an ecological turn in attempts to address climate and biodiversity crises. Ecosystem service (ES) assessments has gained influence in this turn, as a means to address environmental issues. The critique on ES stresses that these evaluations of nature’s value in terms of how well an ecological phenomena serves human well-being rely on anthropocentrism and fail to acknowledge for multi-species interdependencies. In this paper, we seek to resituate the human in ES by visiting urban gardeners’ work with soils. Soils, a bioinfrastructure invisible in ES assessments and approached in urban planning as an extractive resource, have proven generative for social sciences and humanities to rethink human-environment relations. Joining this line of work, we draw on our own and others’ ethnographic engagements with soil practitioners. Urban soil growers define themselves and their practices in terms of servicing (rather than merely receiving) and caring for local ecosystems. These care practices are informed by a concern for the environmental challenges that we are facing on different scales and unequal terms. To learn from and find ways to recognize these practices, we try out a reconceptualization of ES from a receiving position of services towards an ecosystem caring. This implies grappling with the notion of care as accommodating ambivalent human-environment relations beyond technoscientific management of bioinfrastructures.