What Is Mycorrhizal Root Builder?

Soils and Roots

• Mycorrhizae literally means "fungus roots." These are colonies of fungal organisms that have adapted to living in root-soil environments. Their presence stimulates root growth and helps plants access soil moisture, along with crucial elemental nutrition. Additionally, they help prevent plants from being harmed by other pathogenic microorganisms and destructive nematodes. Some mycorrhizae are so specialized that they only live in symbiotic relationships with specific plants, like orchids. However, most are generalists that happily coexist with many different types of plants.

Plants and Microbes

• Plants require a full suite of elemental nutrition for healthy growth, flowering and reproduction, but they possess no comprehensive means of their own to access these. In forming relationships with mycorrhizae, they provide the fungi organic nutrition, in the form of carbon-containing sugars and starches, supply them with vitamins and offer them shelter within plant root cell structures. Experiments growing plants in otherwise sterile soils have demonstrated that mycorrhizae significantly improve plant growth rates, overall health and crop production.

Rhizobia

• Beneficial soil bacteria, called rhizobia, provide plants with nitrogen that they require for photosynthesis, cellular metabolism and enzyme activity, protein building and reproduction. Plants cannot access gaseous nitrogen from the earth's atmosphere directly. Multiple species of rhizobia do this for them, by converting atmospheric nitrogen to molecules or compounds that plants can easily absorb and use, via their root structures. This process is called nitrogen fixation and is of special importance to legumes. It is a vital component of the planet's ecosystems, in addition to being of benefit to plants in your home garden.

Encouraging Mycorrhizae Presence

• Garden products that add mycorrhizae and rhizobia to soils can significantly improve plant growth and health if they have been previously lacking or insufficiently present. Organically poor soils tend to support fewer colonies of beneficial soil microbes, whether they are sandy or clay-dense in nature. In addition to using mycorrhizal root builders, you can encourage the presence and health of soil microbes by supplementing soils with organic matter regularly. Materials that you can use include finished compost (household or horticultural), finished manures, leaf mold and humus, along with supplements like alfalfa, blood, bone and feather meal. Avoid using broad-spectrum fungicides or microbicides unless absolutely necessary to control harmful species. They can wipe out all microorganisms, including the good guys.