Hello, everyone. Welcome back to the Epic Gardening Podcast. Today we're going to be talking about

Micurizae. This is something that you probably heard a lot about and you may or may not have seen me talk about especially on

Instagram where I've been using a lot of mycorrhizal fungal inoculance.

So the question is what actually are these these? What do they do? Why do we talk about them so much?

And why are they so important? So the next couple of episodes we're going to be talking about these.

I'll do my very best at the level of knowledge I personally have to explain this in a way that makes sense.

So here we go. I always like to look at the word and what the word means. So myco-risee, myco equals fungus, rhizae equals roots. So what does that mean?

It's a fungal hyphae that has a symbiotic relationship

to plant roots.

These are very primitive, and then they're actually thought to have

arisen hundreds of millions of years ago and people honestly thought that they

were kind of the exception to the rule.

Now we know that they actually are the rule.

These relationships are formed in almost all plants,

rather than only some plants.

Mycologists have divided my chrhizal fungi into two different categories

depending on how intense that relationship is. There are ecto mycorizal relationships, ectom meaning outside, and what that refers to is the

fungal high face surrounding and sometimes penetrating root tissue, then there's endomcorrhizal relationships, endom meaning inside, which as you might

imagine means that the hyphae or the fungal hyphae will enter into the root cells. So the ecto outside mycorrhizae are not found in

too many plant families but they are important in woody plant species and they create a crazy network throughout mulch throughout topsoil etc.

So if you're using a wood chip style mulch then it's very easy for you to find fungal hyphae and especially mycorrhizal hyphae in that mulch.

In contrast, the endo or the inside mycorrhizae are widely spread throughout tons and tons of different plant families.

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