Rootgrow

I hadn't heard of the brand name: mycorrhizal fungi, rootgrow, rootgrowprofessional, plantworks

I've been meaning to trial some on my patch and I have a garden centre gift voucher, so thanks for the reminder

I used it when I planted a Hawthorn hedge, but did not do a trial without it so I don't know how much difference it makes. Have not considered using it on veg although a friend said he used it when he put a patch down to alfalfa as a long term project.

Quoting myself from another forum:

"From what I can gather online. Rootgrow contains spores of a fungus that grows as underground fibres, attaching itself to the roots of plants and produces strands of underground growth that go far further than the roots of the plant itself, which can help mainly with getting phosphates out of the soil but other nutrients as well and giving them to the plant. In return, it takes some of the energy from the plant, that the plant gets from the sun, through its leaves.
So, for growing potatoes in bags,where you have a small space and are adding fertiliser of some form, I wouldn't think it would help much but maybe it would in open ground.
If you google "Glomus mycorrhizal fungi", there's loads of links to research on this stuff. Unfortunately for me, most of the results may as well have been written in Chinese."

As this is in the New Shoots forum, it's probably worth mentioning that although potatoes are often called root crops, they are not in fact roots but stem tubers that grow out from the underground portion of the plant stem, at or above the root level, so anything that is designed to aid root growth, won't directly affect potato growth but will help the plant get the nutrients it needs to grow the potatoes.

I have read up some more about this fungus now, and it seems there are beneficial, neutral and parasitic varieties of it ( the ones in Rootgrow are all beneficial types, of course) and varieties are very commonly found in the ground everywhere. If you have a well established one, it seems that trying to intoduce another is difficult but none of the varieties do well in soil that is well cultivated, so if anyone is thinking of moving from regular doubling digging to a no-dig or raised bed system, then adding Rootgow is probably a really good idea.

I used rootgrow on half my overwintered strawberries last winter - when I re-planted them all, the ones I had used it on had huge masses of roots, the ones I didnt had about average ones.
I also used it on my trees but alas forgot to buy some before my two new ones arrived, so they will just have to fend for themselves.

Yes, that was what I meant to come across - the research says this stuff can be fantastic - just not always, depending on what is in the soil already. Always worth a try, though!

If anyone fancies trying it, make sure you order the with gel powder option. I mix mine to a thin wallpaper paste consistency, then blitz it with a stick blender - It coats the plant roots beautifully then.

Use a small tub (a cylindrical 500ml or 1l ice cream container is ideal) to dip plugs into, or a new paintbrush for larger size jobs.

The closest i've come to a trial is when potting on my courgettes, forgetting to use the fungi on the first seedling then remembering to try it with the second. The one with added fungi is looking significantly bigger, bushier and healthier (i will inspect the roots tomorrow), but how much of that is down to the fungi i don't know. Hardly a side by side trial but there you go.