Experiments with mycorrhiza 2004

Fungi in the nursery

I once heard prof. Zbigniew Sierota, IBL in Warsaw, saying that mycorrhiza will be authentic, if there will be toadstool fungi growing in a nursery. And so it happened. A beautiful Suillus luteus grew in the container of pine mycorrhizated with the oldest inoculant that we produce, i.e. Juni X. In order to complete this information, I will mention that this fungi occured also in dr inż. Jerzy Kubiak's experiment. Since there had been other fungi, Morchella elata, growing from this spawn, we can conclude with a total confidence, that the Juni X inoculant consists of fungous spawn of both Suillus luteus and Morchella elata.

Note: Suillus luteus and Morchella elata are both edible (and moreover, very tasty) toadstool fungi growing in Polish forests. The latter is additionally very rare.

A beautiful Suillus grew out of a hole in the pot

Morchella elata, very rare fungus, grew in the sand with mycorrhizated seedlings

An experiment with fertilizers and mycorrhiza

In this experiment, we used Thuja plicatoides "Smaragd", plants that were transplanted from 9×9 boxes into 2.5-l pots. The plants were mycorrhizated during transplantation, while the fertilizers were applied to the ground. The experiment began in May, 2004 and is going to be continued the next year. Annual increment in height was measured.

	Control plants, not mycorrhizated			Mycorrhizated plants, Juni X by Mykoflor
Control plants without fertilizers	29,7		100%	41,0	138%
Scott	33,5	113%	100%	44,2	132%
Agriform	33,6	113%	100%	45,2	135%
Basacote	36,9	124%	100%	48,8	132%
Silvamix	37,0	124%	100%	48,4	131%
Multivit	40,9	138%	100%	50,6	124%
Agrecol	37,8	127%	100%	50,0	132%
Hydrocomplex	38,0	128%	100%	45,7	120%
Florovit Iglak	30,5	103%	100%	45,2	148%
Entec Perfect	35,1	118%	100%	45,4	129%

Looking at the results, we would conclude that only the Multivit fertilizer stimulated growth as much as a mycorrhizal inoculant. In our opinion this does not even require further comments.

The results are by courtesy of Dr J. Kubiak.

Comparative experiment

In November of 2003 a comparative experiment with different mycorrhizal inoculants was conducted. We used one-year-old pines from pots, which came from the Nędza nursery (Chief Forestry of Rudy Raciborskie). We took seedlings mycorrhizated with Hebeloma crystoliniforme, Laccaria laccata and without mycorrhiza. In November of 2004 we measured annual growth and number of buds at the top. The results are presented below.

Inoculant	Average growth	%	Number of buds	%
control	18,3	100	10,2	100
Laccaria laccata	20,8	114	9,4	92
Hebeloma crust.	17,3	94	8,1	79
Pini SKO (Mykoflor)	23,2	127	11,2	110
Hygrophorus hipoth. (Mykoflor)	26,7	142	16,2	159
Juni X (Mykoflor)	26,7	146	16,7	164

We publish only those results, that were given by Dr J Kubiak. Complete results are due to be published by Warsaw Agricultural University.