[mad librettist]

Hi there fellow geeks, here is what I am proposing:


Just as we keep mother plants, it is possible for us to keep myco mothers.

The reason we should do this? Because with only 3-6 months from seed to senescence, cannabis isn't "permanent" enough to enjoy the benefits of replacing some fertilization with inoculation in a meaningful way.

For those happy to be organic hippy type growers like myself, the easy and obvious answer is to keep a network of companion plants in specialized media designed to last for many years and growth-harvest cycles.

But what if you only want to grow cannabis in containers, and not mess this living mulch business and the extra lighting required? Well in that case I think the answer is to keep a small bed of mycorrhizal plants on a windowsill somewhere in the house.

You can start with a tray, glomus intraradices spores, some local dirt (sterilized if you must), and seeds for mycorrhizal plants that will grow easily in your environment with only window light or maybe a bit of additional lighting.

when you need to inoculate cannabis, instead of using a powder you can harvest a plug from the tray, and use the root material to inoculate rooted cutting with live mycelia instead of spores.







am I on to something or just stoned?

[Weird]

i do this when i want the benefits of myco in my soil but i dont want to cycle the soil as its growing but have the cycle completed before

I want to inoculate dirt with myco and let it run its course and add it as a top dressing or up pot with it than to keep living

i never tried to keep the mycelium living, but i am sure there is a way to keep them in feed or in greater stasis

i like the idea however of farming and having available active benies

i do this more often for bacterias when I am running teas

in the aquarium world (part of my jaded past) they use biological filters

i have incorporated them in teas and they help keep the colony alive, thus contributing to the krebs cycle, buffering ph faster and add the capacity to have a constant tea running



later i added just plain filter floss and bag to the filter compartment so three would be more surface area for bacteria to breed

basically an attempt to keep a healthy incubator for bacteria where i can simply take from and add too without having such severity in fluctuations in the brewing process

[mad librettist]

The idea is very different here.

The fungus would itself be selecting which microbes thrive.


A normal cannabis grow cycle is not long enough to see benefit from spore inoculation.


The fungus can live for some time after plant death, but can't be transferred to a medium other than live roots.

[dizzlekush]

Originally Posted by Weird

I might have my science wrong here but AFAIK arbuscular mycorrhizae need a host plant to propagate and their mycelium is invisible to the naked eye. Trickoderma is green in color, so its not that. Ectomycorrhize need no host plant and their mycilium is visible with the naked eye, so we're looking at colonies of ectomycorrhizae(or some non-beneficial fungi), which is useless for cannabis, correct?

Mad your idea sounds solid to me, AFAIK they use a similar process to commercially propagate AM for sale, they just use high level sifting procedures to separate propagules from soil.

However as i understand it, host plants only have 1 significant symbiotic relationship with 1 ssp. of AM, which the host plant chooses through a process of root exudation, and the optimal ssp. has been shown to be different for different cultivars of the same species in many experiments, so the AM that colonizes your 'farming/sacrificial' plant might not be the ssp. of AM that your cannabis wants. Admittedly i know little about mycorrhizae, but IIRC my readings as well as results of many experiments come to the conclusion that any synergistic (not symbiotic) effects between AM and host plant is ssp and cultivar specific:
https://www.icmag.com/ic/showthread.php?t=226218

[mad librettist]

all mycorrhizae are obligated to have a host. AM tend to associate with the plants we are growing, rather than trees. The actual difference between ecto and endo is whether or not the mycelia go inside plant cells or just between them.

The only way to see AM fungi is with staining. It is invisible to the naked eye.

The fungus is Weird's photos is just white mold. Soil mycelia look like strings, not like fluff.

[Slimm]

If symbiosis is the issue then make the host / inoculating plant cannabis. Btw, I think it just the glomus species that you want to culture here. AFAIK the endos and the glomus compete so use a myco mix without endos in it.

I am with Mad on this one but my take is an assumption. In my no till 50 gallon totes that I veg and flower in I have inoculated the soil with spores for this round of flowering. I know the life cycle is not long enough to benefit the plants now in the containers but upon harvest I will plant the next round right where the existing plants are now. The fungi survives long enough after the death of the previous plants to attach itself to the newly planted and off they go. Not very scientific but for me a workable solution.

And as with Mad I am running different types of plants as companions with the cannabis strains I am growing to aid in this procedure.

[dizzlekush]

Originally Posted by Slimm

If symbiosis is the issue then make the host / inoculating plant cannabis. Btw, I think it just the glomus species that you want to culture here. AFAIK the endos and the glomus compete so use a myco mix without endos in it.

All organisms in the glomus genus are endomycorrhizae, however the term endomycorrhizae is being replaced in academia and science by the terms "Arbuscular mycorrhize" or the less common "Vesicular-Arbuscular Mycorrhizae", when it applies (not all arbuscular mycorrhizae have vesicles).

[Crusader Rabbit]

Originally Posted by mad librettist

The fungus is Weird's photos is just white mold. Soil mycelia look like strings, not like fluff.

I think that the white fuzz in the photos is the stalks of the fruiting bodies of the fungus growing up into the air to release spores, not the mycelia which thread through the soil and absorb nutrients.

[Weird]

Originally Posted by dizzlekush

I might have my science wrong here but AFAIK arbuscular mycorrhizae need a host plant to propagate and their mycelium is invisible to the naked eye. Trickoderma is green in color, so its not that. Ectomycorrhize need no host plant and their mycilium is visible with the naked eye, so we're looking at colonies of ectomycorrhizae(or some non-beneficial fungi), which is useless for cannabis, correct?

Mad your idea sounds solid to me, AFAIK they use a similar process to commercially propagate AM for sale, they just use high level sifting procedures to separate propagules from soil.

However as i understand it, host plants only have 1 significant symbiotic relationship with 1 ssp. of AM, which the host plant chooses through a process of root exudation, and the optimal ssp. has been shown to be different for different cultivars of the same species in many experiments, so the AM that colonizes your 'farming/sacrificial' plant might not be the ssp. of AM that your cannabis wants. Admittedly i know little about mycorrhizae, but IIRC my readings as well as results of many experiments come to the conclusion that any synergistic (not symbiotic) effects between AM and host plant is ssp and cultivar specific:
https://www.icmag.com/ic/showthread.php?t=226218

let me explain my little experimentation

these were part of my foray into organics

its simply premier peat, ewc, perilite pinch of bone blood and dr earth which i had used primarily for the benies added

i do not get visible fungus if i do not use a light crate and have regulated temps

now if i understand correctly, the visible growth is most likely an expression of the ectomycorrhiza put in the soil but it offers me some insight to the a few factors including if my soil is supporting fungal growth and how that growth is cycling

regardless since most practical myco applications are judged and justified by results not by soil samples the best I can do is cycle the soil with right components and gauge my efforts by my results

i did find the mortar pan and light crate a very good environment for creating a surface area dominate space for with great potential for mycelium propagation