Wild Mushrooms for Ecosystem Development

Found in a tucked-away corner of the garden, just near the cottage...

Mushroom Culture Step 2

Shiitake mycelium in a culture
jar, cloned from a mushroom.

Our Mushroom-growing experiment progresses well, if a little slower than expected. In the first step we cloned some Shiitake cells into several Malt-nutrified agar vessels. Not unexpectedly, given the crude nature of our lab setup, some of those became infected with other, unwanted organisms and had to be tossed out. There remained two jars of clean, healthy mycelium - the "root" structure of fungi. The next stage in growing Mushrooms is to bulk these up into much larger volumes.

This is their story.

Shrooms

Yes, its that time of year, and there's been good rain.

Mushroom Cloning Update

The mushroom culturing experiment is going well, though not as well as I had hoped. Still, lessons learned...

I had to chuck out three of the culture jars, as they were infected. Two of them were a sadness, because the mushroom fragments implanted in them had taken hold really well, and the mycelium was growing nicely. Alongside a green and a black mold, respectively. So out they went!

Of the remaining five jars, one has failed to do anything. No infections, but no signs of growth, either. I suspect I may have poked the bit of mushroom too deep into the agar medium. The other four have mycelium growing, with varying degrees of vigour. Obviously I will favour the most vigorous grower when it comes time (in a week or so) to expand them up into grain growing media. The mycelia are beautiful, and exactly as described in my reference. More updates as they develop...

Happy International Biodiversity Day

In which we embark on a new venture in Mycology

Shiitake mycelium, Day 2.

Funny thing is, the mainstream western press seems to have missed IBD completely. I guess the UN's announcement that today¹(22 May) is International Biological Diversity Day was lost in the noise of all those species extinctions directly resulting from man-made global climate change. (Deny it all you like, the evidence is pretty compelling: we are the cause of global climate change.)


Serendipitously we started a new project last Thursday that can only help – in its own tiny way – to bolster our local ecosystems' robustness. We have started a Mushroom growing project.


Buoyed on by my success in culturing brewing yeasts (despite the significant limitiations of my "lab" setup) I decided to have a go at tissue culturing Mushrooms. The result you can see for yourself... the little grey smudge in the middle of the jar is (hopefully) the mycelium of Shiitake mushrooms-to-be. The other smaller greyish smudges towards the right of the jar are really dings in the agar medium where I cooled the knife prior to excising a tiny bit of flesh from a reasonably fresh mushroom prior to placing it on the agar substrate.

See, it's all part of a bigger permaculture-ish picture... three threads coming together...

Thread One: I've read, watched and heard quite a lot about "Hugelkultur" lately, mostly as evangelised by Paul Wheaton over at permies.com. I like the way that Sepp Holtzer, the guy who has been practising and working on this technique, refuses to get pigeonholed as "doing permaculture", thereby dodging all the Permaculture Dogma that tends to go along with Permaculture True Acolytes. I like his style so well that I think I'm going to steal it... The hugelkulture idea seems reasonable to me, especially since I daily observe decaying tree trunks and logs in the forests and plantations that surround our home, and it is blatantly obvious that the decaying wood serves as an effective water and nutrient reservoir. Then, too, I have long noticed that veggie beds that host a vigorous and healthy fungal life also host the healthiest and quickest-growing veggies.

Thread Two: Reading Paul Stamets' ideas for myco-permaculture, I've been researching mushroom varieties that would (hopefully!) work well in guilds and successions. Based on my reading in Stamet's excellent "Growing Gourmet and Medicinal Mushrooms", I chose Shiitake for my first mushroom-cloning attempt. Shiitake should grow easily on the growth media most available to us – Pine logs, chips and shavings. The Shiitakes will play their part in decomposing the wood substrate, which should (if my understanding of the theory is not too broken) then be quite well suited, with the addition of compost and soil, to growing other mushroom varieties – probably Portobello (button) mushrooms, but maybe some other variety between them and the Shiitake. After that I should be able to grow veggies in the remaining bed.

Thread Three: I've been doing some work on modifying the brewery² (described here, here, here and here), not to mention brewing up a storm. So I am ending up with lots of spent grain remains from brew sessions. A 40litre batch of beer produces around 25 or 30kg (wet weight) of bran containing some weak sugars in solution, cooked grain kernels, and a bit of starch left unmodified by the brewing process. Ideal stuff for growing mycelium! Then, too, yeast is just another fungus, and has, indeed, been used in experimental trials for sterilising/pasteurising mushroom growing media. A win all ways!

Convergence

So I thought to myself, "Why wait for several years for a hugelkultur bed to gain a natural mycosystem? Why not hurry things along?" And thus was born my mycosphere garden-bed idea... (or is that a "Mike-o-sphere"?)

I plan to build some beds using pine logs, wood chips, shavings,... whatever I can lay my hands on cheap (read: free) and in abundance. These beds will be innoculated with (initially) Shiitake mycelium, and hopefully we will, in the fullness of time, harvest mushrooms. The Shiitake will be followed by further mushrooms in some sort of yet-to-be-determined sequence, thereby rendering the woody core of the bed quite well decomposed. After that I will convert the bed to conventional veggie production. The mushroom growing plays along extremely well with the brewery, and both endeavours demand a small amount of lab culturing, which has been fun to learn about. And, if the Mike-o-sphere beds work out anything like conventional Hugelkultur beds, I should be able to reduce the brittleness of our water-dependence in the garden, because, although the Offialdom Of The Kakistocracy no longer consider us to be a drought area, and. although we have experienced over 50% above average rainfall for May, we are none too convinced that the drought is truly over.

The Garden Route truly is a canary in the coalmine for global climate change...

We simply have to Adapt Or Dye.

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[1] I guess the UN must have missed noticing that they were scheduling IBD day for the day after The Rapture. Oops.
[2] I'll write about the brewery redesign soon.

Return of the Mushrooms

The Mushrooms have returned! Seems they were just waiting for a bit of rain. Even more prolific than last year, they're popping up all over the lawn.Good reason to not mow the lawn -- a job I detest that goes against every grain in my being¹.

Their flavour is not to be compared with pathetic store-bought fungi, but what I really like best is the idea that I did absolutely nothing to grow them! Oh, I helped them along a little by ensuring that I spread some mature mushrooms around the garden last year so that they would spawn in fresh places, but aside from that it's just been a question of gently plucking them from the ground.

I like the idea so much that I'm going to try and extend it...

The South end of the veggie garden is the boundary of our property bordering the road. Along the fence-line there are a bunch of trees: mostly Australian Blackwoods (Acacia melanoxylon) that are not only and invasive alien species, but a bloody nuisance. The only good thing they do is suck so much moisture from the soil that not even the Kikuyu² grass thrives. And, as I get rid of the Blackwoods, bit by bit, the Kikuyu wants to return. My plan is to burn what's there off, and immediately plant a mix of Comfrey³, Globe Artichokes and Jerusalem Artichokes⁴. Maybe some sort of N-fixing groundcover, too.  Where I eliminate the Blackwoods, indigenous pioneer trees readily sprout, and I'm happy to have them! The idea is to establish an area where -- like with the mushrooms -- I do nothing much. And then "hunt" my harvest rather than work at it. Even though I may only get a much smaller harvest, it seems worthwhile, since the (small) aera in question is a wasteland right now, and I don't intend to put any energy into the system beyond getting it established in the first place.

In like vein, there was a significant (2- or 3-dozen?) Guinea Fowl infesting the Chicken Run this afternoon, cleaning up the remnants of the Chook food, I'm sure. I tried -- much to the delight of OB the Hunting Hound -- to bag one with the Pellet Gun, but said Gun is too pathetic (and the shooter struggling with new varifocals!)  to pull the deal off. So I'm thinking about how to devise a Trap... Progress (or its lack) shall be reported here. Watch This Space!

If I ate red meat, there's a herd of wild Bushpig that wants culling. According to one neighbour, our garden is visited infested of an evening by no less than a dozen Wild Boar⁶, and, according to another, one of these is "the biggest Bushpig I've ever seen!"

I like the idea of Wild Food!

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[1] It's not a very huge swathe of lawn. Mainly around the house and areas we frequent so that there are no good hiding places for venomous vipers. I know that I should get sheep and ditch the mower, but then I'd have to find a way to keep them away from the fruit trees and field crops. And I don't eat red meat, so there's no incentive in that direction.

[2] A weed that brings to mind many rude words. Almost impossible to eradicate, but at least nominally indigenous.

[3]Because I like Comfrey. OK?

[4] I just acquired some Jerusalem Artichoke roots last year after many years of searching. Whether I like them enough or not remains an open question⁵ -- they've not thrived in the drought, and produced only a few small tubers this year.

[5] Even if I don't like them, I'm sure I can brew them up into booze. ;-)

[6] ...or local equivalent...

Magic Mushrooms

In the past few years we've had the occasional mushroom pop up in the lawn, and eventually a body has to get around to wondering, "I wonder if I can eat those things..."

As a child I was fed many dire and dreadful stories about people -- "Seasoned mushroom hunters! Decades of experience identifying and picking wild mushrooms..." -- suddenly up and dying after a dreadful mistake consuming a "poisonous toadstool". So it was with just a hint of trepidation that, after much careful umming over mushroom books and identification guides, J standing by with the car-keys ready to rush me off to hospital at the first signs of turning blue, I gingerly tasted a tiny fragment of one of these little white lawn-jobbies a few years ago... Too tiny a fragment to even find out if they tasted good! Several hours later, still alive, I tried a bigger piece, and waited for The End. Or at least some decent hallucinations.  No such luck. Some more hours went by, and, emboldened by my continuing good health, I ate the rest of the damn thing. Delicious!

The mushrooms in question are Agaricus campestris, the Field Mushroom, and a close relative to Agaricus bisporus, the Button Mushroom we so commonly buy in the supermarkets, and they're a roughly similar size shape and colour to Button Mushrooms. Around this area there are no poisonous species similar to the Field Mushrooms, so you'd have to be pretty careless to mistake these for something poisonous.

For reasons unknown, this year we've had a sudden population explosion, with small clumps of these mushrooms popping up like mad all over the lawn over quite a wide area. Enough to keep us well fed with mushrooms for the past few months, and especially welcome through Winter when not much else is happening in the garden. Never an all-at-once glut of mushrooms, but a pretty constant supply -- enough that we've not had to buy mushrooms in 3 or 4 months.

Of course they're not the perfect, clean, brownish-white of indoor-cultivated commercial specimens, and we have to clean off odd bits of grass and twig and soil before they're ready to eat. The flavour is similar to a Button Mushroom, though a bit stronger and wilder, most likely because they're absolutely fresh. But the texture is noticeably different: silkier and a bit "slippery" when cooked. We've been enjoying them in pastas, in pizzas, with eggs for a breakfast feast, and raw in salads.

Apart from the odd mushroom getting trampled or pecked by curious chickens, we've made sure to leave a fair percentage of them to open fully and release their spores in the hope of equal (or better) harvests in years to come. Not only have they been a welcome addition to the food supply, but they also confirm my long-held belief that mushroom cultivation is a natural for our area.

I'm also sure they're trying to teach us something about the need for healthy mycelial life in our soils...

Catching Up (A Little)

Whew! Busy times mean less blogging. Consider this a quick catch-up, and I'll try and fill in the gaps in a couple of weeks' time.

Veggies
Despite the Wounded Knee (still troubling me, forcing me to move slowly and carefully, but steadily getting better, thanks!) I've managed to dig eight new beds so far, with another 5 to go before I reach my goal. I don't expect too much out of the new beds -- they still need a couple of years of composting before they reach a good level of health.

The Tomatoes have come up. The first were already showing their heads last Friday, only five days after they were sown. This is out in the open , mind-- no greenhouse, no glass, no bottom heat. Only the Tigerellas are being tardy. (Uh Oh!) Tomatillos are up, alongside Radicchio, Lettuce mix, Endive, some of the Squashes and Artichokes, and even a few of the Chillis.  (That was quick!)  I'll follow-up with yet another sowing of most of these again towards the end of the month.

So What's Been Happening?

So what has kept us so busy, you may wonder... Older Son is getting married next weekend, so we're having family from both sides descend on us for the coming week :-O Bride's family are all from Pietermaritzburg, Groom's from Cape Town. Don't expect much in the way of farm news for the next couple of weeks.

During a couple of rainy days early last week I managed to get closer to the finish line with a software project I've been working on sporadically for a couple of months. More when I'm closer to releasing unleashing it on the unsuspecting world! A hint: it's to do with my main passions and predilections -- gardening, seed-saving and tilting at corporatist/ globalist windmills.

The Mushroom Book arrived, Hooray!  Paul Stammets' Growing Gourmet and Medicinal Mushrooms. Wow! Everything from A to Z. So lots to learn. Already I'm trying to figure how and when to incorporate fungal growth into my soil improvement efforts.