JW: I'm Judy Wagley. This is “From the Ground Up!” When I go to the farmers market in Mount Pleasant on Thursday mornings, I'd like to stop and visit with Andrew Curtiss and his family from Show-Tiss Farm and Shepherd. There's always a gorgeous display of colorful produce, and Andrew always has interesting information to share. What have you got for me today, Andrew?
AC: Thanks for having me here today, Judy. Today I want to talk about mycorrhizel fungi.
JW: Say that again.
AC: Mycorrhizae fungi.
JW: Mycorrhizel fungi. OK, what is it?
AC: Yep. Yeah. Well, if you've ever rolled the dead log in the forest, maybe. And you see these white--they almost look like threads-- in the soil. That's mycorrhizae fungi. and what mycorrhizae fungi do is they form a symbiotic relationship with your vegetable plants, with your trees, grasses, different plant roots. And in that symbiotic relationship-- that's a mutually beneficial relationship, the plant tells the fungus that it needs minerals and water. And the fungus tells the plant that it needs carbon. And that plant actually sequesters the carbon from the atmosphere and releases it through its root system in the form of a sugar. And it's a sticky paste that comes out and the fungi eat it. And so they mutually and beneficially benefit one another
JW: Yes, truly a symbiotic relationship.
AC: Yes it is.
JW: So why is it important for us as gardeners?
AC: Yeah. So what happens is it takes your plant’s root system and it can increase the root mass of your plant by up to 100 times. There's two types of mycorrhizae-- there's “endo” mycorrhizae and “ecto” mycorrhizae. Those are two fancy words and I probably would flip them if I tried to describe. One surrounds the root and the other penetrates the root, so one will actually bind itself into the root and the other will surround the root. And so I would have to look up which one’s which, but I know that that's what the two do. And when they form that symbiotic relationship, they increase that root mass up to 100 times. So your plant’s root system gets just that much bigger and your plant is that much more available to get nutrients from the soil.
JW: Is it something that we can add to our own soil?
AC: Yeah. Yep. So at Show-Tiss Farm we actually inoculate or add mycorrhizae to our potting soil. And then when I plant my garlic in the fall, I inoculate. I get the powder, and I inoculate the garlic itself as we're planting it so that throughout the winter and in the next spring, that symbiotic relationship is happening. And as the garlic is growing roots, and mycorrhizae are growing as well, then I end up with, in my opinion, much better plants.
JW: Where do we get it, and how do we incorporate it into our own soil?
AC: Yeah, so there's a few ways. To get it, the first obviously is to order it online. You can order it from different websites on the Internet and then it comes in a powder and then as the water washes it into the soil around the roots, it begins to come to life just like a seed and grows that way. You can get it if you don't have the money to buy it online or you just want to do it naturally. It's super abundant in good quality composts. Fungi are the decomposers of the world, and so as compost breaks down a lot of those mycelium are inside there. Those mycorrhizae fungi are inside there--and so a good quality compost will have it as well.
JW: If we go out into the woods and turn over a dead log, we could really see this stuff?
AC: Yeah, yeah. The first time I ever saw it with my own eyes, it actually was in the fall. I was doing fall clean up in the garden and as I was pulling plants up, you could just see this white mat from where we had inoculated it in the spring. And it's the same in the forest. When a log falls and it hits the soil, what happens is those fungi begin to consume that log and that mycelium layer will be there, and it'll be white and it's out there. You can actually, if you wanted to inoculate your own compost, you could go into the into the forest and find an old-growth style forest where you know it's not swamp or muck or mud, and you could take a few shovelfuls. You'd obviously want to make sure you either own the soil or the farm or the woods--or you had permission to do that. You wouldn't want to do that on state ground. That would be, you know, against the law. You wouldn't want to do that in a city park. That would be against the--- well breaking rules at the very minimum. So yeah, you could. It's abundant in nature. It's nature’s decomposer. You know, you never see fertilizers spread in the forest because the leaves fall in the fall, and then the fungi break those down and turn them into a humus for the plants to eat.
JW: It's all connected, isn't it? And Mother Nature takes care of all of it!
AC: It really is Judy.
JW: Andrew Curtiss, from Show-Tiss Farm in Shepherd, thanks for joining me today for “From the Ground Up!”
AC: Yeah, it was a pleasure to be here, Judy.
