Science Buddies: "Ask an Expert"

hi everybody,

i´ve started planting 5 acre of rapberries one year ago and im always searching the internet to learn more about my biggest hobby, my raspberries.
yesterday i was picking the weeds by hand and accidentially i pulled out a 5 month old red raspberry plant (variety SKEENA)
i foung noodles on the roots similar to thoose that i have on all the clover, i have never seen or heard of anything similar on rapberries.
so i checked the internet and found some sites, something about rhizobium rubi and about black raspberries but nothing specific.
can you help me? have you heared about that or is it possible that my rapberries do have theire on nitrogenproduction, or are there any diseases
that look similar?
thank you for all the links above!!!
looking forward hearing from you.
best regards
uru

Hi,

Welcome to science buddies! It sounds like you have made an interesting discovery in your raspberry field. If the “noodles” you found look like the nodules on clover and if the raspberry plant looked healthy, then it's possible that they are due mycorrhyzial fungi living symbiotically on the raspberry roots. These microorganisms help solubilize nutrients and also fix nitrogen. If you have never seen anything like this before, then I recommend taking a sample of the noodles to your local agricultural agent to confirm this.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mycorrhiza

Here are some additional links on this topic.

http://www.agronomy-journal.org/index.p ... Itemid=129

http://www.extension.umn.edu/distributi ... g1152.html

http://www.cof.orst.edu/cof/teach/for44 ... 3/myco.htm

http://www4.nau.edu/gehring/web/research/mycorrhiza.htm

Are you planning to do a research project on this topic? Or, do you know a student who is interested in doing a science fair project? The purpose of the science buddies website is to help with science projects, so please do let us know if there's anything else we can do to help.

Donna Hardy