More Shrooms, for Drying and Storing

The mild, intermittent rains are bringing ever more Garden Giants, popping up all over the wood chip yard. I went down with two boxes and harvested all the best looking ones, wine-red caps (hence its other name: Wine  Cap), nicely concave, the annulus (or ring/skirt) still high up under the cap. I came away with …

Mushroom Cultivation Workshop

What a day. Pouring rain for the first part of the mushroom cultivation workshop at Allandale Farm with NOFA-Mass Dan Bensonoff. Good for the fungi, and because it was pretty balmy, not harmful too humans. I am ready to start growing some mushrooms other than Garden Giant.  After that, potting up tomatoes, and sowing squash …

Compost and Comfrey Tea and Wood Chip Heaven

After a couple of unseasonably cold and gray days that warranted warm socks and a sweater, we’ve returned to hot (+90F) and sunny again. I return to monitoring my one barrel of rain water, which is about 1/5 full (empty). The couple of rain storms we’ve had and the one night of drizzle failed to …

Korean Natural Farming: IMO 1 (i)

Another oft-used (and used in quantity) cohort of living allies in Korean Natural Farming is  IMO: Indigenous Micro Organisms.  The IMO “input” is made in several steps, from IMO 1 through 4.  IMO 1 is the “catch” of said microorganisms, and in each subsequent  step you get to culture these, growing their quantity until you …

Fungi (i): Edible Mushrooms

Back in winter, my friend Alex and I were planning on starting a mushroom farm on the property. Unfortunately our calls for logs (oak, birch, beech, etc.) didn’t produce any, and so the inoculation season passed us by. But all was not lost. In  2010 I bought and planted mycelium of King Stropharia.  Stropharia rugosoannulata, …