THE MYCORRHIZAE EFFECT

a symbiotic association between a fungus and the roots of your plants that helps you grow bountiful fruits and vegetables let's see the effect of mycorrhizae so to see the benefits of mycorrhizae you could either buy a product that contains mycorrhizae or you could even add them separately to your soil and in most cases it may already be present in your soil especially if you use a lot of organic material like compost so let's first understand what all this means in a mycorrhizal Association the fungus attaches to the roots of the plant and provides increased absorption of nutrients and minerals to the plant in turn, the plant provides glucose to the fungi this is a mutual relationship that benefits both the plant as well as the fungi so let's look at a common product that's available in most garden stores this a ProMix HP with mycorrhizae its a professional growing medium it's a soilless growing medium and it also contains mycorrhizae which would greatly benefit your plants as we will see So the high porosity usually means that it has a lot of porous material like Perlite and this product contains just three things peat moss, perlite and mycorrhizae now to neutralize the acidity of the peat moss it also has some added garden lime or gypsum so this is how the ProMix HP medium looks like its light it's fluffy it provides excellent drainage and is a very lightweight potting mix that you can use so with a soil-less mix you need to use a fertilizer and you can either use an organic fertilizer are you can use a slow release fertilizer like Osmocote Now we can create a soil-less potting mix by using organic fertilizer first so as you can see what I'm doing here is I'm adding the ProMix HP soil less growing medium and then I'm sprinkling some organic fertilizer in between now it's important that you sprinkle some fertilizer and mixed it at all stages you can do the same thing with a slow-release fertilizer to like Osmocote and instead of mixing it just at the top layer after each layer of soil that you add to your container you sprinkle some slow release fertilizer and make sure your mix it very well with the potting mix so you could either use organic fertilizer or a slow release fertilizer both of which work equally well since this product already contains mycorrhizae after 30 days these are some carrot seedlings that were sowed in regular potting mix and as you can see they've grown reasonably well however look at the same carrot seeds that were planted around the same time in fact about 20 days earlier and just look at how nicely they've grown compared to the regular potting mix so this is proof that the mycorrhizal mix really works very well and here are some cabbage that's growing in this Promix HP medium versus that growing in the ground you can see a big difference the ones growing in the ground are not as prolific so when I bought this product it actually looked a little expensive to me however when I realized that it has peat moss it has perlite has gypsum and most importantly mycorrhizae I think if you add up the cost for creating your own potting mix with all these premium ingredients you're gonna be spending a lot more than this so I highly recommend that you get this product it's very good value for money and you will grow bountiful fruits and vegetables for a long time So let me know if you've tried this product or any other product which has mycorrhizae I'll see you again soon Happy Gardening!