We all know and love mushrooms, many of us enjoy them in our food and their many health benefits, but did you know that mushrooms do more than just help our bodies? The mushrooms that we see are the flowers of the underground network that acts as nature’s nervous system. Plants live beneath the earth as much as they do above. Roots reach out and down to find water and nutrients to grow and be healthy. Underneath the surface there is so much going on we aren’t aware of. The roots of these plants and fungi will connect with one another, giving nutrients if one needs them, and sharing knowledge and information with one another. Such as, in forests, if a tree gets a disease the roots of these mushrooms will send messages to the nearby trees telling them what the disease is and what to start producing to protect against it. As well, if a tree dies the stump and roots still have the ability to store and share knowledge with the existing trees and the new saplings that take their place. Their stumps also provide a place for fungi, animals, and other plants to live and thrive.
This integral and key part to all plants lives, and our own, is known as mycelium. Mycelium are fungi networks that grow deep into the earth and amongst the roots of plants to source nutrients and bring them to where they are needed. The plants in exchange for what they receive from this connection, give the mycelium sugars they produce from photosynthesis. Without out this the nutrients on the earth’s surface would be far rarer and most of what would be here would have been leached into the earth a long time ago. This ancient connection has been around since the early dawn of life on earth.
In Ireland, before modern farming was implemented, during the time they let the fields rest from farming potatoes, edible mushrooms grew wild. They would collect them and eat them each season. As more people started to till their lands it broke up thousands of years of mycelium connections beneath the soils surface and the Ireland potato famine came to be. Plants that had this supporting connection taken away were now open to disease easily coming in and taking its toll. The old farmer’s new this. It is coming up more and more so now for our way of being on this planet to integrate these old understandings with the way we live now.
The Sonoran desert does not have very much organic matter in its soils, and the amount of caliche in the soil makes it harder for these mycelium to exist here, however it still does. So the next time you see a mushroom growing out in nature, while we don’t encourage eating it due to there being many different kinds and a lot of them being poisonous to humans, you can most definitely appreciate it and know that there is a lot more going on beneath the surface.
Mushroom Mycelium depiction
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