Kiwifruit orchards are full steam ahead with new plantings and the new season’s crops. This is a critical time to attend to your soil’s health and ensure that new plants have the best chance to produce a healthy yield in future years when they are ready to harvest. At Roots, Shoots and Fruits, we have one of the most valuable assets to your orchard. Curious? It’s called Rootella, and it will work wonders for your crop. Let us explain.
Rootella is a soil amendment that introduces Mycorrhizal fungi into your soil. You may not believe us right now when we say this organism is worth many times its weight in gold, but, read on, because you will.
Here are 5 benefits of Mycorrhizal fungi for kiwi fruit growers:
Insurance (reduced plant loss)
Mycorrhizal fungi is an insurance policy for your newly planted vines, with significantly fewer losses of new plants to stress, water issues and competition from pathogens, which means this product pays for itself.
Better crop nutrition
Mycorrhizal fungi form a giant web of thin tendrils that pervade the soil. These tendrils latch onto root systems and effectively act as extensions of them. Kiwifruit vines have shallow spreading roots. Connecting symbiotically with this fungi will extend the kiwifruit vine’s effective reach and enable it to access more nutrients. In times of stress, such as during a drought period, this is a crucial advantage.
Increased growth and yield
Mycorrhizal fungi not only has positive benefits for plants, it also revitalises the earth. Its web-like structure provides stability to the soil which helps with nutrient and water retention. With better access to nutrients and water, crops achieve superior growth in their roots and shoots, leading to higher yields.
Disease resistance
Keeping your kiwifruit vines healthy by providing adequate nutrition will naturally lead to a higher resistance to disease. Rootella’s ability to increase a vine’s nutrient uptake makes it not only a benefit to your crop’s growth profile, but also an investment in disease prevention. Mycorrhizal fungi suppress the ability of pathogenic fungi to proliferate in the soil around plant roots by utilising resources secreted by the kiwifruit vine outcompeting pathogens for this resource and through various phytoalexin signalling.
Better fruit quality
Better access to nutrients means you can expect improved flowering which leads to a superior fruit set. After fruit set and during ripening, inoculation with mycorrhizal fungi leads to higher values of total soluble solids and greater nutrient density. Together with increased yield, you can expect a higher quality harvest all round.
Carbon storage
Concerns over climate change have led to increased interest in carbon storage as a potential solution. Forests have a huge carbon storage capacity because they feed on carbon dioxide. Studies suggest that over half the carbon stored in the ground is due to vegetation and the mycorrhizal fungi that feeds off the vegetation’s store of CO2 in order to grow.
Improving yields and fruit quality while contributing to climate change action makes using Rootella a win-win for everyone.
To learn more about how Rootella can complement your current fertilisation regime, contact Roots, Shoots & Fruits Director, Molly Callaghan – rsf@rd2.co.nz
Last year on the net I found the JH Biotech Biological organism products. I wanted a healthy orchard and decided to invest my money on Tri D25 and Superzyme
Flowering is up to 1,800 flowers in a bay, at least 90 flowers per sq metre. We have changed management technique, which gives us more options for crop loading and sizing and then we thin to around 900 good fruit per bay. The more Tri-D25 I use, the more my orchard flowers.
– David Sutton, Kiwifruit Grower
