Fun With Fungi

At the suggestion of our designer, Erik Blender, we attended a workshop (playshop) this weekend about fungi! Specifically about growing edible mushrooms. Yum.

The class took place on the beautiful Winslow Food Forest in Boring, OR. This brand-new food forest is only about five months old. All of the plantings are young and just beginning to show some growth for this spring. We are very interested to follow this permaculture model and see it grow in seasons to come.

Winslow Food Forest hosted Mitra Sticklen from Sporulate Learning Farm to do a two day playshop on mushrooms. Saturday, we learned about how to grow edible fungi on logs and stumps. Fungi are a vital part of the ecosystem in soil helping to breakdown and decompose dead wood and other bio material as well as feed the soil for new plants to come.

The first day of playshop, we learned how to inoculate logs and limbs and even tree stumps with a fungi mycelium of your choice. After it colonizes, it will fruit (bare mushrooms) you can then harvest and eat. It will do this over and over, about every three months, until it has digested all of the log or stump. We were excited at this possibility as we are having a large birch tree removed, as well as a larch. The benefit to inoculation is that you know for sure what kind of mushrooms you are growing, you will be breaking down the stump and roots thoroughly back into your ecosystem AND you get to harvest and eat them! What a deal!

The second day we learned about growing mushrooms in the soil, compost or directly on the ground. We also learned that mushrooms are capable of breaking down petroleum based oils. This process is known as mycoremediation. Our designer suggested that we could inoculate wood chip paths on either side of our driveway with oil-eating mushrooms to help keep the oil from cars in out driveway from seeping into our garden. We might also put the wood chip path along the street to help with remediation, but also just so people stepping out of their cars have something firm to stand on rather than the muddy grass that currently exists. The mushrooms that we would produce from this effort would be an edible variety, but we would not eat them as they would be fruiting in highly tread areas and although mushrooms can safely break down petroleum and not be harmful....they may not taste very well. In fact, we heard that mushroom taste can vary depending on what kind of wood they are growing on.

On the first day we brought home our newly inoculated oak log with shiitake mushrooms. Incidently, shiitake in Japanese means "oak mushroom." From the second class, we inoculated two mushroom beds in the Winslow Food Forest and we brought home some spawn mycelium of the white elm oyster mushroom or Hypsizygus ulmarius, which we will add to our wood chip path, although we may order some more to make additional logs (for eating).

The class was awesome and we would recommend taking a "playshop" from Mitra Sticklen as she is fun and very knowledgable. We also recommend visiting the Winslow Food Forest in Boring, Oregon and checking out their list of events. Now, we just have to get on removing those trees so we have some mushroom logs and wood chips to play with!

Grass Roots

We bought our house five years ago, just before we welcomed our fourth child. It was built in 1962 and much of the house, inside and out is all original. It is set on the inside curve of our street so front and side yards face the street. The lot is a quarter acre and the house sits on about half that space. The landscaping is 50 years old. Two spruce trees, a birch, a volunteer larch, a maple, and a hazelnut grace our yard; all mature and in need of pruning. The cedar shrubs are all overgrown and taking over the driveway and the fence. When I went to plant some flowers in those first years of homeownership, I discovered all of the yard that wasn't designated "lawn" was covered in landscaping plastic under the bark chips. The previous owner had put in a few azaleas just before selling that were choking under the plastic.  I remember ripping up the plastic from around the plants in an effort to save them. I felt like the plastic was smothering them and I had to let them breathe! Darren assured me that landscaping plastic was an accepted practice to prevent weeds, but I was never convinced it was healthy.

Aside from mowing and planting a few bulbs, we didn't do anything to the yard in four years.  Then, last year, along with Darren's sister, Dana and her husband, Stephen, we decided to use some of the underused lawn to put in some raised beds and plant vegetables. We put in two boxes that Stephen put together and Darren found a crate box we used for potatoes.  We decided we didn't care if we were successful, we just wanted to give it a try.  We knew that we wanted to grow them without using chemical fertilizers and see what happened. It was a good run.  We really enjoyed making salads with our own vegetables and watching our kids discover the joy of pulling a carrot out of the ground.  And, we were using our yard in a place we never went to unless we were mowing the lawn. It felt good to get out in our own yard and use it for something productive! Productive. Efficient. Organic. Sustainable. Edible. Compatible. These are words that consistently lead to a set of design principles called: permaculture. The dictionary definition (a al dictionary.com):

per·ma·cul·ture [pur-muh-kuhl-cher]  Show IPA

noun

a system of cultivation intended to maintain permanent agriculture or horticulture by relying on renewable resources and a self-sustaining ecosystem.

Permaculture design combines art and science to create plant guilds that will grow together in abundance, working together to give the nutrients they need without artificial fertilizers and pesticides. The practice also seeks to use water efficiently, often reclaiming water from the land or roofs that is normally wasted. The model is based on the observations of how plants work in harmony in a forest operating in various levels from tall trees to root level.

This all sounded very good to us. We began to think of our yard having lots of potential, but we knew we didn't have the knowledge to start this on our own and we needed a plan. So, we hired Erik Blender, an Ecological Land Steward to help us design our yard.


Now the fun begins!

Growing Interest

A year ago, permaculture was just a buzz word we sometimes saw in the clutter appearing and disappearing on our iPhones when we searched for information on how to plant our new raised-bed garden. Today, we find ourselves unable to think about much else as we excitedly prepare our yard to be transformed into a permaculture paradise. A year from now, we may laugh at our naïve undertaking and be merely satisfied with a few fruit trees. Who's to say? We won't know until we explore our growing interest in permaculture. This blog will be the journal of our progress in the yard as well as a place to share what we learn from this experience.  We want to bloom where we are planted and now we are going to bloom in permaculture.

Pax,
Darren & Corrie