wild liquid inoculum

[Paul Stewart]

I have been fooling around with various methods to grow mycorrhizal fungi 
in culture, with little success. I am currently trying to germinate 
spores in a complete medium used for plant tissue culture, as well as a 
medium used in one guy's thesis on mycorrhizal basidiomycetes.
According to Stamets, only those mushrooms that can fruit in sterile 
culture (wood digesters) can work as a liquid inoculum, since you need a 
sterile fruit body and/or spores to start with. What I propose is to 
establish a clean clonal culture of the mycelium from, say, chanterelle 
or boletus caps, blend it, grow it in a liquid culture as mentioned above 
(complete with whatever is needed, such as Murashige and Skoog's Basal 
Salts Medium and trace elements), then use this liquid inoculum to 
inoculate tree roots of the appropriate species. 
	One big problem, causing failure of planted mycelial plugs by 
other workers, is that there is already a well-established mycorrhizal 
fungus, bacretia, VAM fungi, etc., on the tree roots, especially older 
trees. I don't want to have to wait for a tree to grow up (I know 
nurseries can inoculate clean baby trees) so can anyone suggest a "green" 
way to weaken or remove the native mycorrhizal fungi from the roots 
enough to allow my inoculum to get a foothold? I'm thinking of lime water 
or a basic solution that I can flush away after with clean water and then 
add the liquid inoculum and nutrient solution into deep core holes around 
the root system. Is this off-the-wall, or what? All comments welcome, 
either to the group, or to my mailbox.   Bye for now...

ABIOGEN c/o Paul Stewart
RR #2 Vernon Bridge
Prince Edward Island 
CANADA   C0A 2E0