What's going on everyone? Welcome back to the Epic Gardening

podcast. I'm here again with Nicole Masters, an international

agroecologist, 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 with almost everything in gardening. I don't have a professional training so I'm almost always sort of a layman piecing little pieces of this large puzzle together.

Could you kind of give us the rundown on what my rhizophungi are?

Yeah, so if you look at what the root parts of the word micaio and rhizo means, so micaus means fungus and rhizo means so myco means fungus rhizo means root

fungus so this process basically enabled plants to come up out of the water

say four hundred and seven 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 Chenopodium family

Brassica's family don't have it but pretty much 90% of plant species do have this relationship.

It can increase how much nutrient and water a plant can access by up to 10,000 times.

So it's something you don't want to see disrupted because it will really

have a negative effect in terms of the nutrients in your food that you're growing.

So this is what we're seeing commercially is large-scale operations corrupt

this relationship and the nutrient density and food goes right down and now they're like,

oh we've got a drought, we're not getting enough water and it's like, actually,

it's not a water problem, it's a microrizzle problem.

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