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This is an ideal time of year for most of the country to stop the practice of growing grass with chemistry.  The staggering amounts of liquid and granular petro-fertilizers that are used every year to support lawns represent an enormous waste of resources for no good reason.   Wonderfully healthy grass can be grown with natural biological methods.  It calls for some changes in mowing and fertilization, plus a little patience, but the end result will be a very attractive lawn that saves money and avoids water-polluting runoff, a major problem for streams and underground water reserves.   The first...

I’m sometimes asked why we put so many different types of mycorrhizal spores in our inoculant products (9 Endo types, plus an additional 7 Ecto types in the Landscape Inoculant and MycoMinerals). Well, it’s very difficult, if not impossible, to predict exactly which type fungi will perform best in different soils on various plants (especially on introduced plants, such as tomatoes or melons which are not native to most areas). Therefore, to be sure that at least one of the fungi types will function well for our customers, we take a “shotgun” approach with several types of spores. Some Endo...

I will soon be leaving Palm Springs and moving to Bear Valley Springs, CA. This is a community near Tehachapi, about 40 miles east of Bakersfield in the foothills of the Sierras. You can Google it - a beautiful cooler part of the state at 4000 ft. elevation with huge old oaks and pine forests. Palm Springs seemed like a good place for someone my age (just turned 70), but the heat has proven to be more than I can stand and not a great place for orchards or summer vegetable gardening, either. My new home will be on more...

A grower recently asked me which of our mycorrhizal inoculants contained the best type of spores for his giant pumpkin plants, and gave me a listing of what he was already putting in the soil. It seems like every year he has been experimenting with different additives to try to boost the final weight of his contest entries and his list had more than a dozen organic-nutrient items, kelp to molassas. Couple points here: First, I could make some educated guesses about which mycorrhizal fungi would be the most likely to colonize the root system of his plants (Glomus intraradices...

So would you say that a Great Dane is smarter than a Chihuahua because it has a much larger brain?  Or that a big squash seed is any better at what it does than a little radish seed?   Taking this thought somewhat further, microscopic mycorrhizal fungi spores also have the ability to "germinate" at appropriate times and are genetically programmed to then perform specific evolved functions.  These tiny invisible particles are every bit as capable of "remembering" their parents' survival strategies as are plant seeds.   For annual seeds which lie dormant over the winter months, some combination of...