alt Hacker NewsMycorrhizal Fungi, Nature's Key to Plant Survival and Success
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This topic is endlessly fascinating. Facilitating interactions between fungi, bacteria and plant roots in the root zone is my goal as a gardener. All I have to do is feed the soil properly to maintain a general balance between fungi and bacteria and the plants will thrive. Mycorrhizae physically join with plant roots and make a partnership. Bacteria are both fed by and consumed by plants. The whole soil ecosystem continually builds nitrogen and carbon in the soil.
I live in a rain forest. Every winter washes the soil clean of the majority of nitrogen that was built up the previous summer. To keep a raised bed alive I have to amend with bulk compost in the fall and spring. Without the fall amendment the soil starves and the spring amendment is less effective. That was until I added biochar(innoculated charcoal) to my beds. The charcoal prevents nutrients from being washed out of the soil when there are no plants replenishing it. In beds amended with biochar I get higher production and lower inputs. Biochar can help reduce inputs on chemical farms too. But, the combination of healthy living soil and biochar, for me, makes gardening easy. I am more concerned with whether a plant has enough sun than anything else these days.
I grow rare cactus and succulents and after experimenting with Mycorrhizal inoculants I’m completely blown away with results I’ve seen. Even with soil that dries out completely between water (for extended periods of time) they still work their magic wonderfully and I see wonderful growth and survival with the roots showing the fungi growth as shown and described in this article.
If you haven’t read Entangled Life: How Fungi Shape Our World, I can’t recommend it enough.
I have added spores to my garden for a few years, & the results have been excellent. Not only have the plants thrived, the network spread through the lawn to a further extent every year, & the grass in that zone looks much healthier than the rest of the lawn. Mostly I sprinkle a bit in with each seed or row — it does the work from that point on.
Trees have shown the same pattern — we had a large, older tree go down, one which had quite a bit of fungus growing around it, & the trees planted near the old site did well while new trees on the other side of the yard did not, even with significant, regular watering.
Although mycorrhizal fungi have their place in plant ecosystems, in commercial horticultural production their benefit is typically outweighed by fertilizers, which result in considerably faster growth and crop cycles. We have trialed and encountered significant results with other "natural" products, such as harpin proteins for ~20% increased plant growth, entomopathogenic fungus Beauveria bassiana for insect pest control, and Prestop (Lalstop G46) Gliocladium catenulatum (Strain J1446) for preventing pathogenic root fungus.
Note that fertilizer applications are not synergistic with mycorrhizal fungi, fertilizer applications typically prevent the benefits of mycorrhizal fungi, plants no longer need to rely on mycorrhizal fungi for nutrients. I have noticed an "explosion" of fertilizer and supposedly growth enhancing products touting their microbial benefits with labels that show long lists of various beneficial microorganisms, but it's mostly just marketing hype.
I like how Ohio state university created a shiitake mushroom memristor. Fungi are fascinating
Fairly old news at this point.
A bit more difficult is growing edible mushrooms along with the plants, for example Boletus edulis, which are symbiotic with oaks and other trees.
The difficulty lies in the waiting period, it can easily take years before any fruiting bodies appear.
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For my work, I spent roughly a year studying the mechanism of roots, on and off. The different routes for nutrient and water uptake, transport, the different types of fungus, the differing ways plants interact with those fungi. And, of course, this is without going into the nematodes and how the plant attracts specific species by emitting tailored carbohydrate packets to both attract the nematodes and feed fungal growth right at the root surface. The very last piece is the ions put out by the roots to electrically attract specific elements, like potassium, nitrogen etc.
It takes hardly any artificial fertiliser (10g per sq meter) to eliminate beneficial fungus from the soil, at which point you are basically running an open air hydro system and have to artificially add nutrients and adjust pH. It takes upwards of 3-5 years to start getting proper results from organic farming methods when switching back and basically involves adding years of organic material to kickstart the organic cycle.
It is totally possible to get comparable results to fertiliser based farming when farming organically, you just need to focus on 'growing' the soil, not just providing nutrient to the plants. In my opinion the former is farming, the latter is hydroponic production. Both have their benefits, it's just that one leaves behind barren soil and the other enriches the soil and is part of a natural cycle that leaves the soil exceptionally fertile.
The RHS (Royal Horticultural Society) sells little packets of mycorrhizal powder that you can put into your garden if you feel it is lacking beneficial fungi. Another more natural route is to bury a kilo of cooked white rice near a very healthy tree, where the soil is soft and 'healthy' then retrieve it after a week. It will be mouldy, but with the right type of mould. Mix that into compost, grow tomatoes in that compost, then when they are finished, chop up their roots, mix it into the compost again, add fresh compost from your compost bin to make seed compost. Mix that seed compost into whatever you want to 'infect'. Some people grow just the fungus using sprouted barley and add the mouldy sprouted barley to their compost.