 We're so glad that you could join us this afternoon. Michael Reise is something that, when I got started, I didn't know anything about it at all. And so as a result, partly to explore things, we made an experiment out of it. And my children will try it this way. So I wanted to introduce my children, because they've done a wonderful job. There's certain parts of this project that they more or less took over. And they really learned an awful lot from it. And hopefully, we can teach you guys a few things, too. This is Patricia. And this is Sebastian. So I'm going to let them get started. And I will go to the conclusion. OK. So our project is using commercially available Michael Reise inoculant compost, or Michael Reise inoculant and compost when transplanting small berry bushes. OK. We got this grand start because we wanted to plant some berry bushes. And we were told by some sources that it would help the bushes if we were to add Michael Reise. There are some other sources that said that Michael Reise is already in the soil. And it's a waste of money to just add more Michael Reise. Some research indicated that a good compost actually enhanced and helped the Michael Reise growth. So what is Michael Reise? Michael Reise is a beneficial fungus that forms a symbiotic relationship with 90% of plant root systems. There are many different types of Michael Reise. Most berry bushes have endome Michael Reise. It makes of 80% of the plants that have Michael Reise. Why would you want to add Michael Reise? Well, it increases the root area up to 700%, increases the plant's ability to help take nutrients and moisture, helps prevent infection by detrimental fungi, and has proven to help plants in nutrient deficient soils and resist toxicity in high metal soils. We used PHC tree saver Michael Reise. It has a variety of endo and ecto Michael Reise with bacterium nutrients. OK, so what is compost? Compost is a mixture of decaying organic matter as from leaves of manure. It also contains bacteria, fungus, and nematodes. The nutrient content can vary, so it is important to know what kind of balance and formula you need in your compost. Why would you want to use compost? Well, it supplies organic matter. It aids in the proliferation of soil microbes. It encourages root growth. It improves the soil structure. It improves the cation exchange, enables soils to retain nutrients longer, and buffers the pH. We used purple cow organic compost. So our grant method was we used Ronia and elderberry, and we had four groups of plants within each of those species. We had a control, which we just planted. We had a commercially available compost only. We had commercially available Michael Reise only, and then both compost and Michael Reise. OK, the elderberry, we put in a perlite vermiculite mix. And the Ronia, we put in a bark peat perlite mix. So we planted the plants. We harvested the roots at two, four, and six weeks. We stained the roots. We viewed the roots under a microscope for Michael Reise, and the data was recorded. We included pictures of plant root mass at four weeks. So now I'm going to pass it on. So here they diagram of what Michael Reise looks like. And here they hyphae. This is called the entry point of a Michael Reise, and it comes through the cells. And this is an arbuscle here, this sort of tree-like structure. And then it also forms things called vesicles, which look like these big oil-filled bubbles in the cells. And so here they picture what vesicles look like under the microscope. Here's vesicles and some hyphae, and that thing. And then here's an arbuscle with a tree-like structure. And then here's both arbuscle and vesicle. There's some vesicles there, and here's an arbuscle. And you can see how they look very significantly. Next slide. So here's what the eronia control looked like at four weeks. Then here's what the eronia compost looks like at four weeks. You can see it's a lot fuller than the control. Then here's the Michael Reise at four weeks. You can see also a lot fuller than the control and a close second to the compost. Then here's both, a lot less full than the Michael Reise at the compost, although it had long, stringy roots. And here's a microscopic view of an eronia plant that had grown and is well-developed. You can see very many vesicles all in here. And so here's what the eronia control looked like before planting. You can see there doesn't look like this much in the way of Michael Reise in there. And then here's the control at two weeks. It's hard to see, although it also looks like here they're not very much in the way of Michael Reise. And then the control at four, the eronia control at four weeks. It doesn't look like there's any Michael Reise in it, although it's a real clear picture of what the cells look like, okay. And then at the control at eight weeks, it clearly has developed many vesicles here and here and then a chain of some there and just a bunch all over. So it did really well at eight weeks. Then the compost at two weeks, it developed Michael Reise right away. Here they vesicle and you can see the high fade. This looks like the entry point. And then here it's hard to tell, although it doesn't look like there's too much in the way Michael Reise here at the compost in four weeks. And the compost at eight weeks, it looks like there might be some arbuscular growth here and possibly some here starting. And then the eronia microreise at week two, there doesn't look like there's any microreise they developed in the road, although it's a good example of a root tip. And then here's it at four weeks, it doesn't look like there's any developed here. Although then at eight weeks, it clearly appears to be forming an arbuscle right here. And then the both at two weeks, it looks as though it's started form, shamed the vesicles here real early on. And then the both at four weeks, it doesn't look like it has too much here that we can see. And then the both at eight weeks, it looks as though there's some vesicle forming here in those places. And then now we're into the elderberries. What the elderberry looked like at four weeks, the control nice full long roots. And though the compost was really full and dense right at the top, there we actually had trouble shaking out some of pearlite for the picture. And then the microreise they, it also looks very full, though not quite as full as the compost. And then the both, it really doesn't look at all full at the top, although it looks a lot longer than the others. And the elderberry can troll before planting, it doesn't look like it had anything here. Although then at week two, it also doesn't look like it had anything. Although at week four, it does look like it's forming something here and possibly something here. And then at week eight, it looks like it's forming bunch of little tiny vesicles that close along here. Then it looks as though this might be a vesicle here. And then the compost at week two doesn't look like it had anything. Although then the compost at week four looks like it's forming loads of vesicles all over along here. Then the compost at week eight, it looks like it's got plenty of vesicles in here. And my cry day at week two, it doesn't look like it had anything. And then at week four, it also doesn't look like it has too much. And then at week eight, it looks like it clearly has a vesicle right there. Then here's another picture at week eight where it has a nice big R-buscle. Then the bowl at week two doesn't look like it really had anything. And then at week four, it also doesn't look like it has too much. Then at week eight, it looks like it's formed a nice vesicle here with a high-phase draining down here than a nice R-buscle right here. Okay, I don't know about you, but whipping parcels pictures sometimes gets really confusing. So I'm gonna try and clarify some of that for you. First of all, I just wanna comment. These kids did a lot of internet research in order to figure out what these things look like. And they look different for every single plant. So you can't say, oh yes, it looks just like this picture over here. And there was no evidence that we could see on the internet of anybody else who's done research on berry bushes to see what their R-buscles and vesicles look like. And so it was kind of a hit and miss. We kind of went through things and figured out what we should be seeing maybe. And there were some things that were questionable. And then we went and we talked to, there's a lady, Dr. Ray Drivers, an expert at University of Nebraska at Lincoln who's worked with Michael Ryse. And she basically concurred with our decisions and said, oh yes, there's lots of times when you just can't tell for sure. So anyway, just from our quick assessment, what we saw was that treatment group A or one would be the control group, treatment group two would be the compost group, treatment group three would be the Michael Ryse only group and treatment group four would be both Michael Ryse and compost. So what we had at week two in the erronea, we had Michael Ryse showing up in the compost and in the both. And so the significance there is they both have compost. So our question is, are we doing a little better with the compost than we are with the Michael Ryse? And the elderberry was planted a little different type of soil and so we didn't, we're assuming that we didn't see anything in the elderberry until a little bit later because of that. But here you could see that we had in the compost, again, we very clearly had Michael Ryse. But by week eight, they all had Michael Ryse in it. And so it's true, there's Michael Ryse in the soil and eventually it will inoculate it through the soil. But in the meantime, that's eight weeks down the line. You know, do your plants need to have that early start in order to survive? I think it probably depends on your environment, depends on what's going on. One of the reasons why we thought the compost might be a little faster is it comes as a, you know, it's like a living compost when you have a well-balanced compost. Everything is moist, it has fungus in it, it has nematodes in it, it has bacteria in it. And so it's all balanced out where when you get the Michael Ryse, the commercially available Michael Ryse, it's like little granules that you mix in. And I'm assuming, you know, by the time they mix in and they start their growth, it just takes them a little bit of time to do that. So go ahead, dear. So what we did was just a few days before the conference here, we wanted to show you what these plants were doing. Now, I'm assuming everybody here had similar conditions that we had this year. 100 degrees wasn't unusual and almost no rain at all, all summer long. I don't know about you, but I definitely reached the limitations of my watering ability because I kept trying to keep up with all the watering and that. And so we had some liabilities. First of all, our aronia didn't do well at all, but they were a little younger plants and when we planted them, they didn't have as much time to start, so we think that's part of it. Plus it appears like the deer, like the aronia a little bit better than the elderberry. And so we lost a number of aronia plants to the deer. And so it was kind of hard to compare things. So we're just comparing elderberry for you. So we started out with control. First of all, what we did is part of our methodology. We planted three plants and to make sure that nothing else infected the plants in the way of other treatments, we put guard plants in between that were treated with nothing and then we had enough space, you could probably plant at least one more plant in between each plant. And so they were really spread out and then we had other plants in between to prevent, if you added mycorrhizae to prevent it from spreading over to the other treatment groups. So we started out with our elderberry control. We had one plant left out of the three. And so you can see, we put this cardboard behind it because we thought it'd be easier to visualize how tall it is and everything. You can see it's about a foot tall and looks healthy but it's still kind of a small plant. So now here's the compost. This, you know, I'm not at all surprised the way this grew out the way it did because that compost root, if you remember that compost root, it was very compact. It had some beautiful roots just under the surface but it didn't have those big long roots. And so this grew out, it's nice and bushy and it's actually almost a foot and a half. Okay, now with mycorrhizae, we actually had two plants that survived out of the three, but they're not quite as big. You know, these are just about a foot for each one. And again, they're healthy looking plants. Go ahead. Now what impressed me was the elderberry both actually was much taller, all three plants survived. And we found that interesting because it had that kind of scrawny root that just kind of extended out. Now, I guess the theory about that one is maybe that long, scrawny root actually got deep down enough into the soil that it actually went to where the moisture was and where the nutrients were. And so all of the plants survived. And this one got tall enough that it actually showed that we weren't using the greatest piece of cardboard. And so that top line is two and a half feet. So that's about a three foot tall bush compared to those one foot tall control and the mycorrhizae ones that were about a foot tall. This one's about a foot and a half, maybe a foot and three quarters. And this one here was about, oh, not quite a foot and a half. And so, you know, to me, that seems to be very significant. One of the things that would be important, we had a little bit of trouble with our cuttings, getting them to grow in the special perlite, mix that we were trying to grow them in to avoid inoculating them with anything that might have come naturally in a soil or whatever. And so by the time we got our cuttings, we didn't feel like we had enough cuttings to be able to do replications, to plant others in other areas so that we could see if the results could be repeated in another area. And so we would like to, I mean, I think to show that this is a good study, we probably need replication. But in conclusion, the things we saw, we saw the early signs of mycorrhizae appeared at two weeks in the eronia compost and both, that should say and both, and four weeks in the elderberry compost. The roots pictured at four weeks show the compost with the most feeder roots, those roots just under the soil with the mycorrhizae treatment second in size while the both treatment had a longer thinner root system. And then after a season of extreme heat, almost no moisture, the elderberry both had all plants surviving with more significant growth than the other treatments. So I don't know about you, I'm very proud of my children. Sebastian took this project, this was his first time in the lab. And what he told me at one point he looked up at me and he says, mom, he says, this is awesome, this is so much fun. And so just made it all worth it. He decided to take that and make it into a science project. And so that's his science fair board that he had. And he designed that all himself. I did help him get some of that plastic on there because that was a little tricky. But other than that, that was his work. And so I'm very proud of him. Do we have any questions out here? Yes, sir. Like if you have raspberry or blackberry or blueberry bushes, do you need a different kind of mycorrhizae than that THC tree saver that you got or don't you? The blueberry has a different kind of mycorrhizae. There's like five or six different kinds of mycorrhizae. Raspberries are endomycorrhizae. What they say is they say 90% of the plants in the world have mycorrhizae in them. 80% of those are endomycorrhizae. So the majority of plants that we see are endomycorrhizae plants. Things like orchids have their own type of mycorrhizae. Blueberry bushes have a little different type of mycorrhizae. Trees, some trees have different kinds of mycorrhizae. The next largest proportion of mycorrhizae is probably the ectomycorrhizae where you'll find some of your conifers and things like that. Yes, ma'am. If you want to cut that down to the ground, you can save those cuttings. A big difference between two to three foot of cuttings and 12 inches of cuttings. Oh, there's no question about it. I think, oh, okay. This lady apparently has elderberries. And so she was saying that when she's planting, she would think that she would need to use both the compost and the mycorrhizae mixed. So she's saying it's very expensive to buy thousands of cuttings and to get that much significant difference between the plants, it would be worth it to her to use both. And so I tend to agree with her. Take her down the ground in January. So what she's doing is she's cutting them down to the ground in January, and then she's getting cuttings from those. And so you get significantly more cuttings if you have a taller bush. Yes. What is my takeaway from this presentation? If I have fertile soil and I want to grow elderberry bushes, or if I have very poor soil and I still want elderberry bushes, what do I do in each case? Okay, has everybody heard that question? Okay, first of all, if you have very fertile soil, I think our soil that we use the elderberries with would be considered fertile soil. We've been putting in organic batter and doing the best we could to keep everything as organic as possible. And even one of the farmers who came down and helped till up our soil said, wow, you've got such great soil here. How is that when everybody else has sand around you? And so I think it just goes to the way we're treating the soil. But you could see that we got a head start. It actually helped the plant out. And it didn't just help the plant out in the year we planted it because this went through one whole season. We planted it last fall and it went through one whole season. You can see the difference. And so infertile soil, I think it helps. But mycorrhizae very clearly has been proven that if you have spent soil, soil that isn't very high in nutrients, that the mycorrhizae will help that. It'll help it significantly. The plant will do much better. Any other questions? I have a question. Yes. You're talking to? So, okay, so the way that he asked how we made this slide, and the way that we made this slide is we took this slide, then we put the roots through processing and we put them on the slide, which is just like a rectangular glass piece. And then there we put some liquid on it and then we put the slide cover on carefully and then that's how we made the slide themselves. I was just gonna add one thing. We, in order to see that mycorrhizae, we had to use a stain. And so it's kind of a tedious process to go through and process those roots. And so we harvested the roots, making sure that we kept everything separated and labeled properly. And we put them in little tiny, like three-gram bottles. Wash the roots, yes. Yes, yes. And we put them in the tiny drum bottles and then we had a series of chemicals. And I don't know if anybody's interested in hearing, but we started out with potassium hydroxide, which is a very strong base. And then that clarifies the roots, which is something that you need with the woody plants if you're going to stain the woody plants. And then we use some hydrochloric acid, which neutralizes the strong base. And then we put a mixture of lactic acid and tri-pan blue and glycerol and water in to stain the slides. And then we process them more in the water bath. And then we did what Sebastian said. We took them out one at a time, labeled the slide, put them on the slide, put them under a slide cover. And he got pretty good at being able to identify the mycorrhizae. Well, both of them did, actually. But to identify the mycorrhizae and to be able to take a picture of it, we had wonderful support. If anybody's interested in doing a SARA project or any project, don't hesitate to talk to your local colleges. There are tremendous people out there who are willing to help you along the path. Yes, ma'am? Are you some more of them? Yes, ma'am. I wanted to know what your production is like in year two. Normally, we get some production in year two, but it's maybe one-tenth of what your full maturity plans will have, or a little more than that, maybe a fifth. So because your plans are getting so much bigger, the first year, I'd be interested to see what effect it has on your production and your second year. Well, we did have some flowers on the both. And what we did was, when a plant is getting started, I usually just pull them off. And so that's what we did this year. And so I am also interested to see just what the plants are going to start producing. We'll see what happens. It was the same variety for all of them. It was wildwood. And the guard plants were actually, which might actually cause confusion later on, but the guard plants were Bob Gordon and Ranch. And so we'll see how it all works out. OK, time. Thanks so much. Appreciate you coming today.