from the gardens...

This morning's walk through the gardens gave me favas, carrots, 3 types of salad greens,  green onions, garlic and onion scapes, fennel bulbs, rhubarb, various herbs, shiitake mushrooms and a couple lizards. No, we don't eat the lizards. I just take their pictures and let them go on their merry, bug eatin, way.

 

 

 

traumatizing the mushroom logs

      Time to make the mushrooms fruit.  We are past last frost and the logs have been inoculated for a little over a year. To get them to begin fruiting they will be soaked  for 24 hours or so. It is also supposed to rain so maybe we can get by without having to flip them.  Once they come out of the water they will go back to their hidey-hole and be watered well a couple times a week (if it doesn't rain) so they can begin  fruiting.  In a couple few weeks we should begin harvesting from them and then we can  start the whole process again for the remainder of the summer.

mushroom logs-first harvest

Just as I was beginning to wonder if the mushroom logs were going to do anything before winter set in, low and behold I checked them yesterday and noticed we had some beauties ready for harvesting. We got about 4 pounds of the oysters and I do believe I saw a few shitakes growing under there. Hopefully the rains coming in will get a few more grown out before the cold weather sets in.

the great mushroom adventure-innoculation

the great mushroom adventure

Even though we live in a place where many edible mushrooms grow wild, there are very few that we feel confident in harvesting. After several years of talking about ordering some to grow here, we finally did it. They finally arrived this afternoon so we will have our work cut out for us over the next few weeks getting the logs prepared,drilling several hundred holes, tapping the plugs into the logs, coating them with wax, letting them rest for a while and then moving them all to their permanent location.

Since we are newbies at mushroom growing we purchased an all inclusive kit for hard woods and then a couple other types for soft woods. The kit contained a drill bit, paint brush, a pound of wax and a mallet and a really cool box but that is another post entirely. All types of the shrooms except the shiitake are native to here so hopefully as we learn more about them we can naturalize them and build our own colony here in the woods. We got shiitake and pearl oysters for the hardwood and chicken of the woods and phoenix fir oyster for the soft woods.

This is going to be quite an experience and experiment. Some of those that we bought will not even make mushrooms for up to 3 years. I am hoping to do periodic updates on the process as well as make a video of actually getting the logs prepared, inoculated and placed.