Well I was going to talk about houseplants this week, but with the warm mid-week weather I ended up outside again doing some landscaping when a new subject uncovered itself. I had a fungus amoungus. Luckily it was a beneficial fungus called Mycelium. 

Mycelium just happens to be one of the best things you can never buy for your garden, you either have it or you don’t. Unlike Mycorrhizal fungi that I have talked about before that can be purchased, Mycelium isn’t commercially available for gardeners. 

Now I’m sure some of you have seen this before, because I used to get many people every year come in an ask what they should do to kill it, until I told them that their plants like it. Mycelium usually show up in and around rotting wood and natural mulch products. 

Some commercial mulches are treated so that they will not produce Mycelium because aesthetically it may not be pleasing to look at. So if you want Mycelium, get a product like 100% natural cedar mulch without any dyes. Last year after we moved to Eldred, we had some large trees taken down that were near our house.

 The logs were taken away and all the small brush and limbs were put through a chipper/shredder and turned into mulch. Last fall I put some fertilizer on the mulch pile to season the mulch a little faster as fresh chipped wood absorbs nitrogen as it decays. It is for this reason that you should not use fresh wood chips until they have sat out for at least one year.

 Usually the chips will go from a nice blond color to a weathered gray. When they turn gray - they’re Okay. 

So my mulch pile has actually turned dark brown almost black in some spots, so I know it is ready to use. As I was digging in my mulch pile, just under the surface was a huge colony of Mycelium already breaking down the mulch. The reason Mycelium is so beneficial is because Mycelium breaks down wood products the same way earthworms break down complex compounds in soil.

Mycelium transforms decaying wood back into useful elements and put nutrients back into the soil for your plants to use. Mycelium works hand in hand with mycorrhizal fungi to increase plant growth efficiency whereas the Mycelium breaks down woody materials and hands the nutrients over to the mycorrhiza to feed your plant roots. 

So I made sure that my mulch pile containing plenty of Mycelium was spread generously across my two new flowerbeds. I have some plants already there that will benefit immediately, but the Mycelium will still be around next year to benefit all the new plants I will be putting in. 

So if you have a few old bags of mulch laying around the garage and you see what looks like white roots running through it, don’t panic, it’s organic and very good for your plants. Maybe next week I’ll get around to writing about those houseplants, unless we get another warm snap.