August 2024
June and July came and went in a whirlwind, and August is on pace to match it. One week into June I felt like I’d stalled out, and by the end of the second week I had my first full-time summer employee and we’d broken ground on the polytunnel (also known as a hoop house—essentially a non-permanent greenhouse.
Now it is almost the end of July and we have currant, hazelnut, and sumac starters in the poly tunnel, we’ve begun testing different ratios of coffee grounds and straw for the mushroom buckets, and our early prototypes produced their first bunches of mature blue oyster mushrooms today! (July 20th)
The first stage of installing the poly tunnel was to remove an old pond that was intruding on the southwest corner of the tunnel’s footprint. A local pond installer happened to be renting equipment to build a natural swimming pool in his back yard down the street, so I was able to tag onto that to get a very expedited excavation.
The second stage is one I borrowed from my old catio in Portland—a wooden frame made of cedar 4x4s staked into the ground with rebar. We used a combination of 2x4s and 2x2s to create a wooden shelf for the panels of cattle fence to rest on on the side of the garage, and mounted some posts in the middle to help the cattle panels keep a consistent curve to avoid snow buildup in the winter.
The final steps were to put white rocks in the base and erect metal shelving for smaller plants to sit on. The sides still need to be built, and we haven’t put the poly covering over the frame, but it is already proving to be very useful—housing our starters until we can plant them in a few weeks.
Another big win has been our first test buckets of oyster mushrooms. Soon after my summer employee Steven Gilsdorf started we decided to throw together two oyster mushroom buckets with a blend of straw and coffee grounds, but without any measurements (the scales and related equipment for more precise measurements had yet to arrive) These buckets were the classic bright orange buckets from Home Depot—not food-safe, but good enough for our test runs until our process is honed in. We drilled holes into them, blended pressure-cooked coffee grounds with pressure-cooked straw and combined that with bits of blue oyster grain spawn. The holes were covered with medical tape to allow for the spawn to breathe while keeping contagions out.
Below you can see one of our test buckets a couple of weeks after inoculation. Below that is one of the mini-flushes from the bucket. We’ve had several days in the mid to high 80’s since I put the bucket out, which is well outside of the ideal fruiting conditions, it’s encouraging that this starter bucket produced something.
One interesting outcome from our more rigorous experimentation is that buckets that have both straw and coffee grounds are taking a week or two extra to fully colonize in our current conditions. The big test will be to see if the extra time is worth the theoretical extra yields. We’ll be adjusting fruiting conditions and coffee grounds ratios with the next few buckets, with the goal being to decrease that time gap, and we’re continuing to weigh every mushroom harvested so we can have a per-bucket yield at the end of the process.
I’m sitting here close to the end of July with so many more things I want to talk about, but this post is already two months overdue and if I aim for more you might never read these words. So with that, some thank yous!
Thank Yous:
I’d like to thank the following folks for helping me with everything I mentioned in this post!
Caelan Murray for coming out to work on the farm for two weeks, focusing on the plant propagation, and refining the mushroom grounds processing process.
Matt Mullins for editing this blog post