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Ch. 5 Fungi

We love to eat them, we know that we need them to make bread, but mention fungi to your average gardener and they get a pained look. And yet without them we do not decompose wood, or grow most of our plants, or maintain soil tilth. Fungi have been getting a bad rap from gardeners for a while, and certainly humans declared war, but these are allies for the most part, not enemies.

What is your take?

HG

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Pretty cool stuff.... the main benefit of all these soil biology chapters appears to be to help us appreciate the amazing world we live in, all the things that we either can't see (microscopic) or just don't see.

"fungi can grow up to 40 micrometers a minute" ! If you do the math that's about .057 meters a day or for those who like English measurements 2.2 inches. That's a pretty amazing pace for something nearly microscopic. They can digest the hardest wood, survive as dormant spores for years, trap nematodes, take down an oak tree!

It's all wonder-full !

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It is the interlocking nature of these puzzle pieces that is the most amazing thing to me. Fungi, frinstance are closer to humans than vascular plants, sharing 22% or our genome and only about 15% of plants... :o

Everything is connected; we are all six degrees from Kevin Bacon, or soil fungi, as the case may be...

HG
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Fungi! These were the guys that really blew my mind as the book was being researched. They are so fantastic! There was so much I had to leave out. There is new stuff in the new edition.

In addition to their nitrogen role in the SFW, they really help make soil structure. There is a picture of the clumped-together-bacterial soil being woven together by a fungus. Ann West took it while she was a grad student. She moved to Australia and I never got to pay her for it! What a pictures. Says it all...almost....then you get into the endo mycorrhizal fungi that are coated with glomalin....this is the stuff that adds the carbon to soils. Who knew? No one when we wrote the first edition. Now we know. Glomalin is responsible for 27 percent of the carbon in your gardens....whew.

I didn't even get into the lichens...fungi wrapped around algae or cynobacteria. Whowie. These are unbelievable organisms. And they are everywhere. Later in the book you will learn how to activate fungi in your soils and compost and you should all try that trick.It will show you how important these guys are to soil structure.

Twm

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I was having a conversation with my wife about chitin, which I think I read is the material used to make the fungal wall, no?

And it is also the material used to make the carapace of a crustacean?

mushrooms and lobster shells...

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And insect shells as well; there are particular bacteria that break it down that may well be a limiting factor on insect population. Checks and balances everywhere. Bacteria checks fungus and insect, insect checks fungi and bacteria, fungi checks bacteria and insect, and so on and so forth as far down the spiral as you can look...

Fungi are what we lack most in our "modernized" soils. In our rush to "master" our environment we have destroyed this most integral and fragile piece more than all the others. It is the first to die in anaerobic conditions, the most susceptible to salts (chemical fertilizers are ammonia salts) and the one most responsible for soil structure. Jeff's example of glomalin is a newer development of great import, especially in this day and age of carbon excess, but fungi's ability to maintain porosity (and therefore field capacity and aeration) is a part of the puzzle we have lost the fastest because we understood it just as poorly as these newer parts, and it is missed the fastest as well...

We still think the word "fungus" with trepidation in the garden, the most of us anyway, but like most fears it is born of ignorance... fungicides do more damage than any pathogen they chase...

HG

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I forgot about the nematode eating fungi. Keeping thinking of nematodes in the higher order/lung of the ladder than fungi. I'm starting to recognize the mycelia in soil and mulch when turning them over, even along the side of the CCB (Corrugated CardBoard) flat when I transplanted the crucifers.

Fungicides -- I'm beginning to think of them in the same anti-good category as antibiotics. "Kills 99.9% fungi!" "Kills 99.9% of bacteria!" -- Leaving only the nastiest to be more resistant and to proliferate. :roll:

Good fungi? As you said HG, except for a few specific examples, not a concept in the average mindset.

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And yet the reality is abouty 6% of fungi are pathogens, and the rest are either benign (with the benefits of added nutrient storage and soil structure) or directly beneficial to plants.

Go forth and spread the word, campers...

HG

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Perhaps some of you remain unconvinced that mushrooms are as important as we are saying, that they are responsible for so much...

Maybe[url=https://www.ted.com/talks/paul_stamets_on_6_ways_mushrooms_can_save_the_world.html]Paul Stamet's TED talk[/url]will change your mind?

Mushrooms may just save the world; not from just one thing or another, but from just about everything we are worried about. Oil pollution, pesticides, carbon excess, viruses, smallpox, ecological damage, even termites!... I think if you name an issue Paul Stamets will figure out how fungi can solve it; just give him a few minutes...

HG

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I found this chapter very interesting as well. Last spring I was cleaning up old wood pieces that had sat under our pine tree all winter, under many of them was fungi. I had no idea what it was at the time but now I know. I thougt it was so gross at the time now I look back on it and think how cool!

This book is giving me such a new way of looking at everything outside. The kids and I were messing around in the garden last night and I was explaining to them about all the living things in a tiny bit of dirt. I explained it to them as bugs that we can't see and how good they are for our garden and to help our food grow. My 4 yr old son then repeated to his dad about all the little tiny bugs that we can't see and how it's not gross, it helps our plants grow. This coming from a little boy who does not like bugs.

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Bet he does now...

Good job, MM... :D

HG

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Yet another great chapter.

You cannot say that one type of microbe is more important than all the others, but I think it suffices to say that fungi are much more important than most gardeners think to the health and quality of the garden.

Really, when you look at all of the benefits of fungi, you could say that in some ways, they have a greater impact in some areas than do bacteria.

I mean, they get much larger, which means they store more nutrients and, thus, release more when they die. Although, you really can't put these two side by side since they are so different, from their diet (lignin vs. cellulose) to their interactions with plants.

It is as you said, HG: checks and balances. In areas where bacteria fall short (decomposing lignin, seeking out and transporting nutrients to plants), fungi excel. In areas where fungi fall short (nitrogen only in ammonium form, decomposing of cellulose), bacteria pick up the slack. There's that circular/cyclical image coming to mind again.

HG, I remember the post you made about phosphate solublizing (probably spelled it wrong) bacteria. It was a PDF file you linked to. I read it and found it very interesting. I thought about it while reading about how fungi, as well, can etch phosphorous out of compounds in the soil and make it available to the plants.

What I though was great about the fungi was not only do they make unavailable nutrients available to plants, micorrhizal fungi actually feed the plants directly!

The section on endophytes really demonstrated a point you had made earlier, HG, about how science has focused on the chemistry for a long time and has neglected the biology. They've just recently realized that there is a living biological fungus (or fungi) in just about every plant on earth! Looks like a good clue to start looking into the biology of things a little deeper. After all, the biology is the cause behind the effect that is the chemistry.

I do have a question, though. On page 64,it says that fungi pursue the woodier, harder to digest substances because bacteria "are better and faster at grabbing and taking up the simple sugars." If fungi grow at a rate of 40 micrometers/sec. and bacteria only move 7 or so micrometers in their whole life, how to they out-compete the fungi. Do the bacteria have greater numbers/density in the soil?

I liked, and will have to remember, the statistics you gave, HG, on the levels of beneficial and pathogenic fungi. It looks like with fungi, as with bacteria, we can create a climate that will help the beneficial ones outnumber and out-compete the undesirable ones.

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Breeding, G5. It's a numbers game, and nobody beats bacteria for numbers. Nobody... fungi have to spore and grow; bacteria just split...and split... and split

HG

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Ahh, that's right! They also grow exponentially: 1 -2-4-8-16-32-64-128...etc.

I suppose when they find something they like to eat, the few that may come in contact with it just multiply so much that the fungi give up and go elsewhere.



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