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Mycorrhizal fungae are defined as “fungae which grow in association with the roots of a plant in a symbiotic or mildly pathogenic relationship”.Any learnings coming out of "Mycorrhizal Planet" reading? Guessing there are good & bad mycorrhizal, thinking honey fungus in trees?
Not sure honey fungus is mildly pathogenic and not sure if it grows in association with the roots or has a different mode of attack. In other words, is it a true mycorrhizal fungae? Not sure!
Your comment does raise the question of what’s good and bad in nature. From a human point of view, yes honey fungus is bad. But, if you’re a species of plant that likes sunlight and open spaces then honey fungus would be good, opening up the forest canopy and letting you thrive. The insects and small grazing mammals that need open spaces would also appreciate the work of the honey fungus too.
Good and bad is largely a human construct. Its superficially good or bad for us, but it may be the opposite within the natural environment as a whole. Farming in a natural way means trying to understand nature, work out why it’s behaving as it is and then farming accordingly. It’s not easy, and we have a lifetime (and arguably several generations) of conditioning that makes us want to kill and control nature.
@exmoor dave mentions ‘weed’ grasses in an earlier post. We’ve all seen them as weeds at some point. Now some of us are starting to see them as forage that grows in early spring, or stays green during a drought, or that withstands hard grazing etc etc. We may not want too many plants of that species, but as diversity in the sward they’re welcome for the job the do. Or we see them as an indicator that we’ve mismanaged our land in some way. Maybe we overgrazed, or we poached it in a wet autumn, or we’ve applied too much N.
There’s lots to be learnt from the book and I’d really recommend it. I may have said this before, but I think if we understand micorrhyzae, we understand how to farm regeneratively. All the ‘best soil practices’ that we have learnt so far are shown to help mycorrhizae, and the benefits mycorrhizae give, from glomalin to increasing the surface area of a plant’s roots a thousand-fold(!!), are invaluable to us as farmers.
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