I’ve been reading Mycelium Running by Paul Stamets (great book!). On page 32, he mentioned that chestnut trees infected with chaga mushrooms don’t seem to get chestnut blight. So even though it’s a parasitic fungus, it actually protects the host tree from a much worse parasitic fungus.
I remember that chestnut blight is a really big deal for people who want to grow chestnuts, a downright existential risk to the American chestnut species.
So . . . that seems like a tip that anyone wanting to grow American chestnuts might appreciate.
Excuse me for being skeptical but did he happen to mention exactly how he knows that? Pure American chestnut trees are not at all common. Am I to believe that he obtained some and grew them infected with chaga, compared to a non-chaga infected control group for however long that might take? Did he repeat the experiment a few times to confirm the results? Not saying he just made it up but to me, it does sound more likely.
“I once received a call from a manager of a chestnut orchard in Quebec, who told me that trees sporting chaga (see figure 47), the aerial sclerotium of Inonotus obliquus, were resistant to chestnut blight. (Sclerotium is a compact mass of hardened mycelium, with stored food, that can sometimes become a detached entity.) When he made a poultice of ground chaga and packed it into the lesions of infected chestnut trees, the wounds healed over and the trees recovered free of the blight. This leads me to wonder whether Inonotus obliquus can operate as an endophyte, as does Fomes fomentarius, and whether these species, or others like them, could defend host trees against invading parasites.”
That’s near the bottom of page 33.
Rereading it, it doesn’t say whether it’s specifically American or European chestnuts. I was assuming American because it’s a chestnut orchard in North America, but if American chestnuts are that rare at this point, it must have been European.
Still, even if that’s only been documented in European chestnuts so far, that seems like maybe something worth trying to see if it could help American chestnuts, too.
