You don’t need a dedicated sterile climate-controlled room to propagate mushrooms at home - they’ve been growing themselves in decidedly un-sterile conditions outdoors since the beginning of time, so you can do it too. Just like sourdough cultures and counter-top yogurt, mycelium is easy to keep alive indefinitely by transferring it to new food sources.

Adventitious Mycelium is adventitious

You can’t see this too well here, but I must have left this Grey Dove oyster kit in its dark incubation area for too long because the mycelium tried to make a break for it. Looking for light and air, it grew a tower of material all the way up to the air patch in the top of the bag (twice, as I accidentally broke a column off its shaky moorings to the plastic bag once.) The corally stuff to the left is the remnants of the dash to freedom – the chunk at the top right is the part that actually attached to the air flow.

From Mushrooms

This is that chunk – see its structure? It wasn’t spongy either, as this suggests – it was wood-solid. Cooooool!

From Mushrooms

Here’s a closer look at that adventitious mycelium, branching off in search of light, air and more nutrients. This chunk of mycelium is actively growing, so it is a perfect candidate to transfer to a new food source a la yogurt starter. If you have an active mushroom bed that hasn’t exhibited this particular behavior, you can use any bit of fully colonized wood chip; if you have a mushroom you picked with a sort of “root cluster” coming off its base, cut off this “stem butt” with the growing area at the base still attached and it will be perfect for this sort of thing. The mycelial chunk at the base is definitely actively growing – it just grew a fruit, after all!

This is the Quick and Easy Corrugated Cardboard spawn method.  Corrugated cardboard is great because it holds moisture and provides shade to the developing spawn, but the corrugations also ensure an air supply and growing space that can’t get cut off by water gluing the layers shut.

From Mushrooms

Cut a piece of clean corrugated cardboard to a workable size – no tape or glue – then soak it in water until you can peel one of the plies off.

From Mushrooms

Layer your actively growing mycelium pieces onto the corrugated portion of the cardboard part. Break them into smaller chunks if necessary – you want the cardboard to lie relatively flat when you close it back up, while still getting maximum surface contact with the pieces.

From Mushrooms

Close up the layers and stack them in some sort of suitable humidity retainer. This is one of those closeable plastic container dealies that isn’t airtight; I could also have used a plastic bag closed 90% of the way if I put it someplace dark where it wouldn’t collect heat, or a cardboard box buried halfway out in the garden, etc etc. The beauty of this technique is that it works with whatever you’ve got on hand and acclimates the mycelium to your local conditions – making it stronger than lab-grown mycelium straight out of a shipping container. 

I closed this container and put it on a shady countertop, opening it daily to spritz with water and letting any excess water drain out before I put it back.

From Mushrooms

One week later you can see a beautiful mycelial ring spreading outwards from a coral piece’s contact point with the top ply.

From Mushrooms

And the whole ply visible. This is great growth – a few more days and I can use this to inoculate any substrate where a layer of spawn is best suited – a lasagna-style box of woodchips or straw suitable for basement growth of fresh mushrooms in winter; layered inside refrigerator-cookie-dough slices of logs otherwise too heavy or unsuited for shiitake cultivation;  wood chip beds outside; or, rolled up or cut into strips, potentially even more tp rolls or mason jars full of pasteurized grain. I just got a pack of hard foam air filter disks optimized for the mouth of narrow mason jars, so I might go with some grain spawn next (as this year’s straw crop is not quite ready.)

Local Fur

My hedge is blooming.

From Plant Pictures

I wonder what it is?

From Plant Pictures

From Plant Pictures

One of the five big “resources” to manage when considering your local environment is the soil. The best long-term way to increase the health and fertility of your soil is to add organic matter – and the least effortful way to do that is to layer the organic matter on the surface of the soil and let existing natural processes break it down for further use. In addition to providing a source of future organic matter in the soil, this mulch preserves water contained in the soil, lessening your need to add additional water; shades the roots of neighboring plants, in most cases making them happier; prevent weeds from growing by depriving them of light; and making your soil microbes happy by reducing your inclination to till underneath it.

I.e., “Mulch is Good.”

However, you don’t have to restrict yourself to dead shredded cellulose – you can achieve many of these same effects by what we call a “living mulch”, allowing short plants to grow underneath your specimens. In addition to shading the soil and preventing growth of unwanted plants, plants have a vested interest in keeping soil microbes alive and are willing to share their food – secreting nutrients from their roots. Soil is healthier with plants in it, than with just mulch on top, than just bare exposed to the sun -

Wpod sorrel self-seeded in a perennial bed

Example – my ornamental perennial bed has an undercoating of wood sorrel. I love wood sorrel to pieces because it self-seeds, comes in various shades of red and green all in the same seed population, and is edible – its lovely tart lemony flavor makes a great accent to salads. The teeny spiral yellow flowers are edible as well, and decorative.

Wood sorrel flower

I love the journal Agroforestry News – I always find out the most random things. Isn’t it fun when the stuff you’re thinking about already shows up in media all on its own? Chefs in Britain are currently paying up to 50 pounds per kilo for wild-harvested wood sorrel – something which comes up for me all on its own every year without any work on my part. Talk about free food!

These flowered for me this week, the first time ever since I picked them at the ND State Hort Society’s auction in Jamestown, 2 years ago? I am comforted to now learn the rule “iris don’t bloom the first year after transplanting.” I was thinking I was doing something incorrectly, like overcrowding. I hope that won’t be too much of a problem as they seem to have again doubled in size this spring.

From Plant Pictures

These are the third fruiting attempts of the italian and golden oyster tp rolls, still enough for a meal this far into their lifespan.

From Mushrooms

From Mushrooms

The gray dove is doing something totally crazy so I will post it separately once I’ve achieved a good picture.

From Mushrooms

I could not wait any longer so I took a peek – my Stropharia bed has survived the winter! Here you can see the white threads of Stropharia rugoso-annulata mycelium colonizing some wood chips (and pine needles). The ridged wood to the top right is one of the pegs of spawn that started the bed.

From Stash

This is my fifth yarn, and it took foreeeeever. Not sure why – maybe it was that the top was really compacted for mailing, or that I managed to spin it quite fine – but this was “on the wheel”? for most of May. I finished chain-plying May 31 and washed it June 1. It looks to vary between dk and bulky weight, and the chain ply always seemed to be tight at the start of a chain and looser to the end, but it was good practice!

From Stash

“Graphium weiskei” merino top from Picnicknits on Etsy.

should be classified as a noxious weed. Or at the very least, require approval of its location before you plant it.

In the middle of your front yard, to decorate one of those ornamental light post thingies, where it can be easily mowed around and thus stay nicely in the area you’ve decreed for it? Sure, go ahead.

On a fence next to a hedge next to my annual and perennial vegetable beds? Noooooo. All it will do is get itself established in the hedge’s roots where I can’t dig it out or smother it with mulch; take over the hedge; and send out scout tendrils to invade my vegetable beds – which I must spend time carefully pulling up as they root at every node, are breakable at every node, and each shredded 2″ section between nodes is sufficient to root and start a new plant.

Please people, understand the properties of what you’re planting and site it so it plays nice with others!

If you want a vine to cover your fence, at least plant a grape so whatever comes to my side I can eat…

I finally got to see the new Star Trek movie. The second matinee meant having the entire stadium theater to myself.

Star Trek: The Original Series is very close to my heart. The first book I ever bought with My Own Money was ST:TOS #41,  The Three-Minute Universe, with Uhura on the cover. This book series was responsible for my triumph in every trivia competition in elementary and middle school, and introduced me to the inestimable Diane Duane. Her first Trek novel, The Wounded Sky, still rates as one of my best examples of characterization and gets to live upstairs in the special bookcase (along with her original Middle Kingdoms sequence, one of the earliest fantasy novels I’ve found with a plausible, compassionate and just plain well-done alternative scheme of human sexuality. See also Melissa Scott.) 

But anyways. The movie. The reimagination of the bridge was bright and clean and glowing and exactly what you’d want it to be. They actually took screen time to explain that this is an alternate timeline and thus is allowed to completely reboot the franchise, and yeah, I get it… I still kind of miss the TOS storyline though. The movie is a great movie if you don’t think of it being Star Trek. If you do, it’s kinda nice to see how they reimagined each character, but kinda sad what they’re doing to it at the same time. But hopefully this is indeed the start of something more for the concept, as I’ve always preferred TOS over any of the sequels…

Simon Pegg is awesome as usual.

Chris Pine is HOT.

I hate Zachary Quinto but I now hate him somewhat less. Maybe even up to neutral/slightly positive. He does look like he kisses very well though. Why yes, I am in a drought, why do you ask? Very canny of them to cater to both the Kirk and Spock fangirls, thus covering 98% of the population.

Winona Ryder I hate with a burning burning passion and when I saw her I wanted to slap the casting director. Just because someone was in a science fiction movie before does not automatically qualify them to be in yours, OKAY?? My god, in all of Hollywood and outside you couldn’t find an actual old woman to play an old woman?

I console myself with the first supermarket nectarines of the season that actually had a fragrance.