Investment in Mushroom Futures is Paying Off

Last fall and winter we purchased some mushroom dowel spawn from Fungi Perfecti and inoculated some sweetgum logs. Sweetgum trees are the first hardwood species to colonize abandoned fields or nowadays, abandoned building lots. They are plentiful, considered to be weed trees, not useful for firewood because the grain is very twisted making the logs hard to split. They also happen to be very appetizing to fungi, especially shitake (Lentinula edodes) and lions mane (Hericium erinaceus) mushroom fungi.
About a week ago we got about 2 " of rain, the first rain in a month. It was perfectly timed for mushroom stimulation along with cooler fall temperatures.
It took about 10 days for the mushrooms to appear. It was tremendously exciting to go out to the stack of logs and see those beautiful things sprouting out. Some of them were huge compared to any other shitakes i've seen. We harvested 1.5 pounds of shitakes and just 2 lions manes.
This was the first time we had eaten lions manes. What a treat that was. We sauteed them in butter with some garlic. They had the texture and flavor of lobster. Deeelllissshhhusss!
Here's a tip about shitakes we learned from Paul Stamets. Placing them in the sun, gill sides up for about 6 hours will greatly increase their vitamin D content making them even more nutritious.
Invest in mushrooms- safer than banks.

Moving Forward at the Funny Farm

As some of you know Robin and I are closing our business The Urban Gardener on Christmas Eve at our current location because of the devastating consequences of the deepening drought and the ineptitude of the powers that be to manage the most limiting resource we have, water. Because the government decided to target the landscape industry in their pitiful attempts to reduce water use our landscape crew has had plenty of time to help us here at the farm. We built a cozy chicken house in the barn for a dozen hens. They will be moving in this spring. We look forward to fresh eggs and lots of poop for the garden.
We have been dissembling the garden center and moving materials out here to build stuff with. We made some terraces that will become home to asparagus and strawberries. We leveled out a spot where we are repurposing a tent structure as a greenhouse in which we will be starting veggies and growing reishi mushrooms.
I have been having fun using the dingo (its like a miniature bobcat) to sculpt the back yard to create some plant beds and a gathering space with a fire pit. My friend brought me a truck load of wood chips which i used to cover the bare disturbed earth. The fungal mycelium will do its job turning the chips into rich soil in a year or so. When we get our mushroom production going we will be inoculating the chips with mushroom spawn so the whole place will be mushroom heaven.
So i guess that is the silver lining in the cloud over our heads at the moment.
Sure wish it would rain, though. 30% chance on Saturday. Whooohooo!
Did i mention the pond is almost dried up. Pretty soon we'll need to have a big fish fry.

Mushroom are coming

The mushroom cultivation workshop with Paul Stamets was great. There were 27 people attending from as far away as Russia, Mexico and Germany. A huge amount of information was presented over the course of the weekend. Paul is so passionate about what he does. It is very inspiring. He is committed to saving the planet with fungi leading the way. He and his team were going to San Francisco last Monday to provide oyster mushroom spawn to break down the oil from the spill in the bay. The oil was soaked up into human hair mats by volunteers on surf boards.
Paul says that the fungi mother the forest. They interconnect all of the creatures. This is the link i have been searching for during my whole career as a horticulturist and landscape architect.
I now see the Funny Farm through a mycelial lens. Everything we do from here on out will be mothered by fungi. We started work on our sterile culture lab today. Soon we will be producing mushroom spawn and inoculating the world with it so we can take advantage of all the nutritional and medicinal benefits that mushrooms provide us.

Mushroom Futures

We had to have a tulip poplar tree removed a couple of weeks ago after some large branches had been broken out of it in a storm. I was staring at the stump about a week later when the bright idea came to me to inoculate it with oyster mushroom spawn.I hopped on Fungi Perfecti's web site and placed my order.
The sawdust spawn arrived a couple of days ago. The past 2 days it has rained so the stump is good and moist, perfect for inoculation. The first step was to drill 13/16" holes about an 1 1/2" deep around the perimeter of the stump approximately 3" apart. ( why a 13/16" hole instead of 7/8" or 3/4" you might be wondering. Well because that is the size drill bit i happened to have on hand). I drilled 2 rows of holes then i stuffed each hole with clumps of sawdust which were the most heavily colonized with mycelia. Next i watered the spawn with rainwater we collected yesterday in our new rain barrels. Then i soaked cardboard in rainwater, cut it to fit the stump and laid it over the top. The cardboard will keep the spawn moist and since mycelia loves to eat cardboard it will become myceliated as well. Finally i covered the cardboard with wet excelsior the keep the cardboard moist. Excelsior is shredded wood that comes to us as packing material around pottery that we bring in to sell at the Urban Gardener. We save it and use it as mulch in the community garden.
Now all we have to do is wait for the fungi to consume the tree trunk and , when conditions are right we hope we'll get lots of delicious, nutritious oyster mushrooms.
When will that be? I don't know. Maybe next spring, maybe 2 years from now, maybe never. It is worth the investment i think.