Mushroom post 2 - detailed instructions

As I wrote in the first installment of the mushroom post, a few weeks ago I purchased an indoor mushroom kit (king oysters). I intend to propagate this kit, so that I can enjoy these mushrooms as long as I possibly can forever.

Reading up, I came across several approaches to mushroom propagation. I'm not 100% sure which will work best for me, so these are the experiments I will set up:

1. Stem butt propagation - to make new mycelium from a single mushroom, follow this video or the     step-by-step instructions in this webpage. Should work well for oysters, king oysters, and morels.     While in the video the mushroom is peeled and the stem is sliced, most websites (and the Russian       folklore) tell you to use the very bottom of the stem as-is, rather than peeling it. If this works, the       next step is just as described for the mycelium propagation approach below - new substrate,   

  humidity.           

  This step requires only corrugated cardboard and an air-tight container.

Morel anatomy. From http://www.waldeneffect.org/

2. Propagation of the mycelium - as opposed to the previous approach, where the actual fruiting body     of the mushroom is used, this approach uses the mycelium itself. This is the      

    stuff growing inside of the mushroom kit. Once the first flush of mushrooms passes, I will take out     some of the mycelium from the mushroom kit, and will inoculate a new container filled with     

    pasteurized substrate (see #3 for substrate choices). The general approach seems to be 500 g    

    spawn for every 2.5 kg of moist substrate (based on here). I will be using the bucket approach.   

    Here is another bucket tutorial, on coffee substrate. Don't have buckets? Use any other container 

    with existing holes (like a laundry basket) or pre-drilled holes, and place it in an intact tote, or even     a large plastic bag. Beautiful pictures with step-by-step instructions here, just click on the "+" 

    sign of each step. And yet another tutorial, covering growing mushrooms on straw, with step-by-       step instructions, using only plastic bags.

3. Substrate choices - from what I have read, oysters (and king oysters) will be happy on coffee    

    grounds and straw; shiitake (unless specifically the straw strain) will want a mix of hardwood    

    sawdust and straw, and cinnamon caps will require sawdust. 

Since I have available wood shavings, and should also be able to find straw, I'm planning on setting up four growing experiments: 1) stem propagation on corrugated cardboard, 2) mycelium propagation on coffee grounds, 3) mycelium propagation on straw, and 4) mycelium propagation on a mix of wood shavings and straw. In the next few weeks, I should be able to start all of these. I will be taking pictures to record progress on all four, we'll see how it goes!

A beautiful, and completely unrelated king bolete. But look how gorgeous it is! From photonaturalist.files.wordpress.com.

Growing mushrooms at home - post 1, general approach

I've been wanting to grow my own mushrooms at home ever since I have come across this picture.

Oyster mushrooms, growing in a bucket on a kitchen counter. From www.milkwood.net

Imagine that, gourmet mushrooms, available whenever you feel like it, fresh, and inexpensive! Growing up in Russia, mushrooms were a huge thing. Everyone picked wild ones in the fall, and most people could identify dozens of edible mushrooms. 

Long story short, a few weeks ago, a few of my friends and I bought mushroom kits for indoor growing; these were shiitake, cinnamon cap, oyster, and king oyster kits, from Wylie Mycologicals, a Canadian company.

The kits come with very simple instructions - for most, the buyer has to do nothing, until small mushrooms are seen inside the bag. Then, a slit is made in the bag, and the mushrooms are allowed to grow bigger. Once they reach desired size, they are cut off the bag and used as needed. The bag is then resealed, and another flush of mushrooms will be expected after a few days. This process is repeated, until the bag feels light, as the substrate feeding the body of the mushroom, the mycelium, is spent. 

King oyster kit. How cool is that? (image from http://static.webshopapp.com/)

The magic part is that if you keep feeding the mycelium, it should, if all goes right, keep on going forever. So, for the initial price of the mushroom kit, one should, theoretically, be able to have a lifetime of free mushrooms! After reading (a lot), these are the general rules:

1) The new substrate can be made of combinations of straw, used coffee grounds, cardboard, grain, wood chips, and sawdust (usually hardwood, NOT softwood), depending on the species - different mushrooms need different foods.

2) The substrate should be pasteurized, and the container, your hands, and all the tools should be thoroughly cleaned with soap, vinegar, or peroxide. Easiest approach for the substrate - fill a large pot with water, bring to 80C, take off the burner, add the substrate, and let it sit for 1-2 h (to pasteurize, it needs to stay above 60C for 1-2 h). Let the substrate cool, strain, and you're good to go.  

3) Humidity - lots and lots of it. The new substrate should be thoroughly moist, but not soaking - the mycelium needs air, and can drown if there is too much water. While the mycelium is colonizing the new substrate, humidity should also be high. 

                                       Oyster mushrooms, grown in a laundry basket. From http://velacreations.com/.

For details an step-by-step instructions on how to make it happen, check the next mushroom post!

Starting from scratch

It's a very odd feeling to come to a piece of land, and realize that it's an empty canvas and you're in charge of making it look the way you dreamed. It's almost impossible to run a full list of things to do, since that would make my brain explode. Let me see: build a house. Create a beautiful, yet functional and reliable food system. Not kill each other. Hmm, shorter-term goals are probably the way to go here :-)

So instead we're trying short to-do lists for when we spend 2-3 days at the property. In our first week, the things to do included: mow down the clearing, till garden patch, limb driveway trees and stake the driveway and house. Done, done, and done...

We planted this year's garden with soldier beans and potatoes. We're treating this garden plot as a "year zero" experiment (as Josh calls it), or "throwaway year" as I call it. As in - if anything grows, great. If not, we're not going to be too sad about it. The soil in the clearing is mostly clay, since the clearing has been cut for (likely) many years now - the organic matter has been repeatedly stripped from it, leaving not that great a soil behind. In comparison, the soil in the forest not 20 feet away is much richer in organic, darker, and crumblier.

In that first week we also planted black currants - we brought 2 currant plants with us from BC. I bought them from a Russian lady in Castlegar, who was swearing to me that they were special, "from Siberia". There are 3 berries on one of them, and they are darkening up fast. We'll see how special it is in just a little bit! In addition, we planted 3 rhubarb plants and a bit of mint.

<-- rhubarb, happily growing in its new spot


Black currants working on getting ripe        -->











Since that first week, the list of small, yet important accomplishments got longer: moved a wild rose plant from the river, where they grow by the dozen, to our property, moved three baby trees (one goosefoot maple and two beeches) from the driveway, where they would get trampled by heavy equipment, to the edge of the clearing, made vertical potato boxes and planted them with late potatoes, built a compost bin, and filled it with a whole pile of fallen leaves left behind by Arthur, and planted pole beans, peas, arugula, and kale. Most of this work was done by Josh while I was trying hard to maintain my full-time work schedule.

<-- vertical potato planter. Yes, they did get covered (and mulched) one the picture was taken.


First-year compost bin. Will get more elaborate with time, but good enough for now    -->






In the meantime, the builders just about completed the driveway to our place, which means that now we can actually drive up the driveway all the way to the house site, instead of hiking out with all of our gear. What a concept!

<-- driveway in the making



Local wildlife coming out after the rain. Unrelated to this post as such, but very cute :-)                          -->

One couple, 2 gardens

Garden 1 - BC
We knew we'd be moving from BC months ago. Therefore, we knew we wouldn't have much of a garden at our current place. Still, I wanted to eat some fresh, home-grown things, so I planned for early-crop vegetables. On the plus side, the garden was all set up, I had seed-starting equipment, and I was eager to get going. On the downside, I really had to stop myself from planting things like tomatoes and such, since they would never make it in time for our move...
We planted early, when most BC dwellers were only ordering seeds or starting to think about wrapping up their skiing season. We used plastic to protect the little guys overnight, and it worked quite well. The peas were flowering as early as May, and we even got a bunch of pods before we left! I was hoping for more, but we didn't continue with the plastic-overnight protection, so plant growth was on the slow side. That said, we've been enjoying fresh arugula, mustard greens, radishes, sorrel, chives, and thyme from the garden for several weeks now, and it's been wonderful. Before we left, another crop of arugula, kale, mustard greens, and radishes were ready, so we were able to them with us on our travels.

Picked about 5 minutes before leaving Castlegar, BC

Garden 2 - NB
On the other side of the continent, the summer is so delayed in comparison to BC, that we actually will be able to pull off an almost-full growing season once we get there in late June. The planting list is fairly short, since 1) we don't know what we're doing, 2) will be busy with the whole building a house thing, 3) won't have 100% of the growing season. What made it on the list are potatoes (late), soldier beans as homage to Josh's grandfather, who grew them on the Kingston peninsula, beats, turnips, greens (arugula, kale, and such), and peas.

Soldier beans

On the cons list, the garden is completely unprepared (= hay field), we won't be able to set up much of an irrigation, the site will be busy with building crews, and we won't have time to start our own seeds. On the pros side, Josh's parents (thank you, thank you, thank you) are buying and starting seed potatoes and beans for us, and will be able to help us to till the garden prior to planting. Side note - yes, we're planning on tilling. Once. After that, we will be using the no-dig approach.

Yay, gardening for everyone!

Gardening, version 2.0, part 1 of ?

This will be my second gardening year. I'm still the first to admit I know nothing about it, and this will be the case for many, many more years, I'm sure. However, last year I knew even less, and it still worked better than anyone could have expected (left to right: tomatoes, peppers, mustard greens)...

Gardening seems like a never ending learning curve. You never "know everything", and that's great. From my first year of gardening, I learnt that you can plant a lot of the things you buy in a grocery store (like pepper seeds and dill, cilantro, and mustard seeds from the spice aisle). A lot Most of the things I learnt were from making mistakes - the tomato cages were too short, plants needed more water than I realized, carrots take a long time to mature (so don't pull them out when the radishes are ready, Sima), the spaces between rows were too narrow (some of us, cough, Josh, cough, have size 13 shoes), and so on, and so forth...

This second year of my gardening experience has already seen its first errors. I used the rolls from toilet paper rolls as seed starting containers. The idea is actually really good - it lets you replant the starter into the garden without disturbing its roots. In my case, two things happened - 1) I overcrowded the rolls and they got very fungus-y, and 2) I made no bottoms to the rolls I was using (as opposed to this), and the roots simply went on a little tour of their immediate environment. So while the pea starter was about 2 inches tall and the toilet paper roll was about 3 inches tall, the trailing roots hanging outside of the roll were about 8'' long. That's why the peas got kicked outside and are now in the garden, in a makeshift greenhouse...

What did I learn from this? That if you use paper-based starting containers, you don't overcrowd them, and that starting containers need bottoms. Will I use rolls again next year? You bet. I like that it's reusing basically garbage, I much prefer cardboard to the plastic (or peat) seed pots, and I do like the idea of not disturbing the roots.

Another thing that I learnt this year (already, and it's only April!) is that given 10 mins of Internet research, some imagination, and a bit of luck, we're actually pretty good and making stuff ourselves and for free. It may not be a thing of beauty, but there's a chance that it'll actually work... Here's our makeshift tepee for things like peas and cucumbers. Made with sticks (picked up for free) and leftovers of crocheting twine I bought 3 years ago for a macrame project.

And it already has its first inhabitants (cue the extra-rooty peas from 2 paragraphs ago). Look at the cute little things!