I love freebies haha.
So I'm still trying to get the basics of the myco relationship but as I understand it, we as farmers cultivate the myco so that the myco can make nutrients available to the roots?
The easiest way to explain myco is this...
Think of myco as a microbe manager that works for the plant.
The plant says "Hey myco, I would like some magnesium please", and myco takes some exudates from the plant, squirts them on some magnesium in the soil, and the microbes show up to eat the magnesium that is now covered in sugars.
Then the microbes poop it out and myco absorbs it and transfers it back to the root, of which it attaches itself to via a special pore in the root made for myco.
Myco lives underground and can't photosynthesize in the dark so it relies on the plant for carbon from exudates and in return transfers food to the roots. It's the key to the whole operation.
You want it as healthy as possible, and hydrolysed fish ferts and raw basmati rice really boost it's health. Rice is a carb and the fish is a protein so together it's a balanced meal.
Mycorrhizae translates to root fungus. It's been with plants since the beginning of time.
Most geneticists predict that one day in the future myco and the plant will become one.
So it's another mouth to feed, that's why your plants improved with the addition of the fish ferts.
If you have some damp used soil put it in a tub, sprinkle some dry basmati on top, mist it, and put a lid on it in a dark place for a week.
When you open it theres a pretty good chance it's going to be fuzzy with myco.
When a plant dies (harvest) the myco spores out and goes dormant over time, waiting for the bioslime of a root to propogate it.
There are many strains, so every time you reuse soil the myco becomes more indigenous to the soil mix/soil biota/plant strain (cannabis in our world), so adding used soil brings both microbes and myco that you spent 5 months cultivating, and innoculates the new mix.
This is how myco became so good at mining minerals, and P in particular. It simply squirts plant sugars onto raw minerals and the microbes literally chew rocks to get the sugars and then poop out the minerals in a plant available format.
Certain microbes evolve to do this better than others, and myco propogates them, so when you reuse soil it gets innoculated with specialists.
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