Kitchen Garden Forum

Several times of the past few years we've had discussions about these (often called mycorrhizal fungi).

There was an interesting program on Radio 4 recently - whilst it was mainly on ancient trees, there was much discussion about the benefits & role of fungi, as they live alongside and support plants.

If you go to this BBC Radio 4 website and scroll down to the one called "Living World - Ancient Trees 28 Nov 10", there are a couple of ways to get this:

a) Click on the "download" link at it will start playing straight away on your PC

b) Right-click on the "download" link and choose "Save Target as" or "Save link as". This lets you save the file and pay it later (eg. copied to an MP3 player etc) if more convenient.

Enjoy

Thank you for sharing this Colin,fascinating, it's one of the reasons I try not to dig, these fungi benefit other garden plants too, they pop up all over my garden now. Garden trees can benefit from these beneficial fungi if you plant a few small plants with rootgrow beneath them within the root zone, the fungi will spread to the established tree.

What I found interesting about this program is when they described the effect of having cattle in a field next to the trees and how that sometimes reduced the level of mycorrhizal fungi.

Obviously some funghi thrive on manure etc. However the suggestion made was that it was the urine & droppings that were suppressing the mycorrhizal funghi. This got me thinking about the effect of putting manure on our plots.

Guess there's a balance between all of these factors....

True Colin, soil is self regulating in wild areas and does very well without any of our additions, just dead plants decaying on top, much more iis returned to the soil than the roots take out and in natural areas only tiny amounts of manure from birds. Fungi move the nutrients around to where they are needed.