A couple of weeks ago our neighbor brought us several bags of sawdust mushroom logs from her visit to a mushroom farm down south.  Apparently the mushroom farm discards all their logs after they have had their first flush of shrooms and there are piles and piles of these logs for the taking.  The logs still have much more fruiting potential but since the productivity declines after the first flush the farm throws the logs out.  We have no experience growing mushrooms from this type of log and I was skeptical that it would be as easy as our neighbor described.  Her directions were to soak the logs in water for 24 hours.   

Then lay down a bed of wood mulch and space the logs about 5-6 inches apart over the mulch to allow room for the shrooms to grow without touching each other.   

Next step was to cover lightly with straw or some other medium that will help keep in the moisture.  Thats it!  No worrying about sterile environments or plastic tent covering. We chose to place our mushroom bed in a retaining wall between our house and our chicken area.  The retaining wall gets partial sun, is protected from wind and gets the overflow of watering from a lettuce bed above so it stays pretty moist.  A perfect place for mushrooms and we dont have to think about tending them at all.  We just have to remember to harvest them once and a while.  

I was so excited today when I went to check, almost all the logs are fruiting.  After only two weeks, we have shitake and oyster mushrooms growing just a few steps from our front door.  

brown shitake mushroom

shelf-like oyster mushrooms

Our first shitake harvest will be fried up with some eggs tomorrow morning!

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Giving thanks for abundance is sweeter than the abundance itself...

-Rumi

In general it has felt like a late, lean year in our garden.  With the lack of rain and our attention focused mostly on the animals, the garden has kept us fed, but felt less abundant than previous years.  And just as I was thinking about how there seems like not as much growing around here (besides the ever prolific squash!), I take a spontaneous walk through the orchard and discover an abundance of fruit in need of harvesting.  In turn, this prompts several days of gathering and preserving.  There are so many plums and apples.  If we wait until the fruit ripens on the trees the turkeys and deer will eat it all.  So in an effort to keep some of these sweets for ourselves I harvested buckets full.  They can all take their time ripening in the sun in our driveway. Some of the trees produced less this year-like the prune plums and the gravensteins- but the grapes are off the hook!  I kept making trip after trip with my basket loaded, all in amazement that the laden vines were hidden under the leafy cover just waiting to be discovered.  Like a kid in a candy store, I cant imagine a better way to spend my day. And into the kitchen I go to make grape jelly, fruit leathers, apples sauce, and dried plums.  (My goal this year is to can enough jam that we will not buy even one jar from Trader Joes!)  The oysters and shitakes from our mushroom bed are going into the dehydrator too for soups later in the season.  Were still crankin out the sweet and spicy zucchini pickles, our preferred method to use up overgrown summer squash.  The Oregon Sweet Meat squash are piling up on the cob bench as they make their way in from the garden. These have become my favorite winter squash for their rich delicate flavor and their ability to keep for almost a year without refrigeration.  They have a striking grey blue skin with a generous bright orange inner flesh. In these days that our hearts are filled with gratitude and reflection, the harvest has begun, and we preserve the bounty one small batch at a time.  

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