[hinkley]

A year or so is probably not enough to build up the predator population.

Intensive agriculture, especially as currently practiced, is all about local optima. If he’d ramped up slower and worked on predator habitat it might have gone better for him.

I have wasps and beetles doing a lot of policing on my property. It’s fungi and weed species I struggle with, not insects.

[mrweiner]

How are fungi causing you trouble? I associate fungi as being positive for plant growth.

[oooyay]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mycelium

Mycelium is very important to agriculture. Every plant has different threats, but I'll use apple trees because I have those. Phytophthora rot is referred to as a fungus but actually is not. Apple scab can be mitigated with a biological control (read: natural predator) and apple rust is solved by proper spacing away from conifers (don't plant an apple orchard within 4-5 miles of a juniper forest) or simply removing galls from affected cedars. Unlike Phytophthora, both of those are a certain kind of fungus which has a different relationship with its host than mycelium does.

Somewhat non-sequitur, we also grow mushrooms. Throwing spent mushroom cakes into my worm bin is an actual super power in composting. It breaks large things down that the worms won't go after so that they're small enough that the worms do go after them.

[mrweiner]

Ah right, I was thinking of fungal-dominant soil and compost, but wasn’t thinking of fungal disease above ground.

Growing mushrooms is one of those things that’s been on my list forever, but I never get around to setting anything up. What system do you use for your mushrooms?

[oooyay]

This one: https://mushroomcube.com/ there are others now, but this kit has been around for forever. It also scales well.

[mrweiner]

Rad, I’ll check it out! Btw since you’re into worms, you should come join the community at https://community.wormpeople.com. New folks are always welcome and everybody is very nice and knowledgeable.

[oooyay]

See you there

[bregma]

One single fungus caused Ireland to lose half its population in 1848 and caused revolutions to spread all across Europe that same year.

Now multiply that by the thousands of different fungi found in a typical garden.

[jhbadger]

Actually, the cause of the potato blight, P. infestans, wasn't a fungus at all, but actually a stramenopile, a group of microorganisms less related to us than fungi are. It was thought to be a fungus at the time because it forms strands that look like mold hyphae, but that's just convergent evolution.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phytophthora_infestans https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stramenopile

[cityofdelusion]

As a gardener, fungal diseases probably cost the most each year in plant loss. They are very difficult to eradicate once established and fungal spores are microscopic and very good at spreading. I’ve had years of 100% loss on tomato’s, peppers, and apple trees, all from tiny fungi.

[xolox]

I grow mushrooms as a hobby and in that context my number one enemy is trichoderma, the green mold. This is because trichoderma is parasitic on other fungi, i.e. it doesn't colonize the substrates that I grow my fungi on, it directly colonizes (eats) the fungal threads (mycelium) thereby killing it off before it has a chance to "fruit" (produce mushrooms).

This is how I initially learned that trichoderma is used as a natural "fungicide". In your specific case it might be interesting to investigate this in more detail, e.g. you can "inoculate" your soil with copious amounts of trichoderma to fight off other fungi.

For more details here's a pointer to a rabbit hole: https://www.google.com/search?q=trichoderma+fungicide

Sorry if you know all of this already, I was hoping it might help :-).

[hinkley]

Monocultures have a multiplying effect on this, and if you really want to avoid problems you also have to worry about closely related plants.

If you avoid monocropping cherries by mixing four different stone fruits, you don’t achieve much. And apples are rosaceae, as are many many other plants, and a lot of pathogens can hop between them.

And every common garden invertebrate loves to nom on fabaceae.

[mrweiner]

Ah right, I was just thinking of aiming to have fungal-dominant soil. I wasn’t even thinking of fungal disease above ground. Makes sense.

[hinkley]

There are at least five roles fungi play. Some are positive, some are neutral, some are parasitic, some switch teams.

Which is part of the problem. Fungicides usually do more harm than good.