Mycorrhizal Mix: Building Fungal Populations in Your Soil

0:05 All right. Well, we are standing in our microisal mix. So, this mix was planted April 15th. It's now June 16th, so we're looking at about 2 months of growth here. As the name suggests, this mix is all about building up beneficial fungal populations in our soil.

0:20 Specifically microisa fungi. So it is made up of species that are extra beneficial and can really make that association with the microisa fungi that we want and so desperately need in our soils. Because of that fact, this is actually kind of a mix that crosses the cool season, warm season.

0:38 Threshold. So we have a lot of cool season species out here, which is why we could spring plant it like we did. So you can see the oats and the barley and the facilia. There's a lot of flax. Flax is extremely mycorrhizal friendly, so we really like the flax. There's sunflowers, but then there's also things.

0:54 Like this is a little millet plant and a little sorghum plant that is in the mix because grasses are really good at making that fungal association and then building those populations up. So this is a good example of you can build mixes or buy mixes that have both cool season and warm season species in.

1:11 It. Now, when I planted this on April 15th, we probably didn't have 65° soil temps, so the grasses didn't germinate, but here they are coming about a month later. So, this is obviously they've been growing for several weeks now, but they have not been growing for 2 months. They'd be quite a bit bigger.

1:26 It is okay to have more species in there and have those plants come up in succession. You need to realize had we had a warm spell, these germinate and then catch a frost, they probably would have died. But this year, it worked out pretty well.

1:39 So there's been a lot of talk about

1:40 Biology and the organisms in the soil, and nothing gets talked about more in my opinion than mycology of fungi because they do so many things for the plant. You know, they're colonizing the root system and they're extending that root system out to help bring in nutrients as well as water in a drought.

2:18 Microisa but you're not really sure if you have it, a mix like this can really help start that boost that give it a big shot. So, not only are the plants friendly to microisa and encourage microisal colonization, we're also inoculating this mix with our micro green microisa inoculent which has 10

2:38 Different species of our buscular microisa fungi as well as 10 other beneficial bacteria. So this is a full package. You're getting the plants. There's probably, you know, 14, 15 different plants in here and then you're getting this 20-way biological inoculant that's going right on the seed. So when

2:57 You plant this, it's a really good way to help a really worn out piece of ground regenerate if you're taking a regen year. And you could graze this, too. It's probably not the best grazing, but for what it's doing, you could allow it to get like this mature, you could run.

3:16 Some animals through here. You would get some decent grazing out of it. All of the biology from the animals would be good and then quite a bit of this would regrow as well if you graze it properly. So again, we can accomplish multiple benefits by putting mixes together in the right way with the right goals in mind.