Hey everyone, Kevin from Epic Gardening here.

We are continuing on with the best of weeks here on the podcast.

Hope you enjoy.

What's going on everyone?

Welcome back to the Epic Gardening podcast.

I'm here again with Nicole Masters, an international agro-cologist and a systems thinker.

We're talking about probably one of my favorite subjects when it comes to the soil food web

and just talking about soil in general and that would be mycorrhizal fungi.

So Nicole, again, with almost everything in gardening, I don't have a professional training

so I'm almost always sort of a lame and piecing little pieces of this large puzzle together.

Did you kind of give us the rundown on what mycorrhizal fungi are?

Yeah, so if you look at what the root parts of the word micro and rhizomean, so mycor

means fungus, rhizomean root fungus.

So this process basically enabled plants to come up out of the water say 407 million

years ago.

And so this fungi has an intimate relationship in and on plant roots that enable plants

to access minerals and enable them to access water.

So without that relationship, they really struggle and they never would have evolved to

come up onto the land without it.

There are some plants that don't have these relationships, so your sedges, your reeds,

the amaranthus family, your centipodium family, brassicas family don't have it, but pretty

much 90% of plant species do have this relationship.

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