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!