Fungi are Really Fun Guys

                                                           

Fungi also known as Mycelium are eukaryotic organisms. Fungi can be single or multi-cellular organisms. Don't get all grossed out, but most of the things you eat have some sort of fungi in it like bread, wine, and solvents. Believe it or not fungi are not plants. Living things are classified into kingdoms.

Plants Love Poop

 How to give them what they want (and what we don't)

This may not be something you love to think about but, in reality, you depend on plants and their affection for eating dead, rotting organisms AND decomposed fecal matter. Fecal matter is a nice, science-y way of saying poop.

There are a lot of harmful bacteria, fungi, and viruses that can be found in fecal matter. This is one reason that we see poop as distasteful (also because it's really smelly). Before the modern era when we discovered that there are tiny, microscopic organisms all around us, humans unknowingly passed around these harmful organisms which spread sickness and disease.

Since we now have a better understanding of how these harmful organisms spread, we can better protect ourselves. For example, we know that terrestrial plants (those that live in the ground) thrive on nutrients from things like poop. We can build situations to let nature take care of these nutrients for us.

Earthworks - Swales

The sun shines. The water evaporates. The gas condenses. The droplets fall. The water runs downhill as it gathers. This process happens whether we want it to or not. We can try to lessen the damage from this OR we can use it to our advantage. We chose to make it an asset.

  

We began to dig so we could slow down the movement of water. The swales, or ditches on contour, that we created will stop the water and help it accumulate and soak the ground around out plants. If it rains hard enough, it will fill the swales and continue flowing downhill and fill another swale. This repeats until the water, if there is enough, flows down into the pond like it would have without the swales.

This feature in our food forest helps us to lessen the need for water and also creates a small habitat for moisture-loving organisms. Later we filled these swales with old pine branches so that the water would be able to soak the branches and keep that area moist. In time, those branches will break down and turn into moist soil that abounds with fungal, bacterial, and plant life.