The thickness of the wood will also act as a buffer to the soil, helping to regulate soil temperatures. Bury them a little if you’d like in the style of hugelkultur or mushroom rafts. Once your logs are ready, stack them on the sides of your bed. It’s a way to hedge your bets to avoid contamination and make sure the mushrooms will fruit. Doing so gives the fungi time to grow through the wood and get established before living on or partially in the soil, where competitor fungi hang out. Let these logs incubate for a season as you would typically, keeping them in a shady area where they won’t dry out. Then, plug it with myceliated wooden dowels or sawdust and seal it with wax. The process is simple: Take a log (preferably oak, sugar maple, or beech) with intact bark and drill holes in a diamond pattern a few inches apart. It’s one of the oldest cultivation techniques we know of, believed to originate in China around 1000 CE. You’ve probably heard of growing shiitake mushrooms on logs. Broad-leaved plants like cucurbits (squash and cucumbers) would be great companions, along with soft fruits such as gooseberry and currants, and even corn.įor more detailed instructions on making mushroom beds, follow this link. Fungi need a moist environment to grow.Īs your garden grows, your plants will provide shade to your beds - mimicking the forest canopy of their natural environment. Just remember to give it all a good soaking when you’re done. Mulched paths benefit from deep layering, roughly 3-5”, while mulched beds can be lighter to keep from burying your plants. Some folks put down a cardboard layer first to help with weed suppression. We use the same process for growing mushrooms- alternating layers of mulch and spawn. If you’ve gardened for a while, you may have used the lasagna method for sheet mulching. One bag of sawdust spawn will inoculate a 4’x4’ space or around 16 square feet. Ready to make some mushroom mulch? Gather up all your materials: a bag or bags of your spawn of choice, enough mulch to make at least two layers in your path or bed, and a water source. As it decomposes, straw uses up fewer nutrients in the soil than woody debris, leaving more fertility in the shallow zones where vegetable roots dwell. While hardwood chips work well in paths and around perennials, we recommend using straw mulch in vegetable beds. They'll quickly colonize this material and easily outcompete other microbes. Oyster mushrooms ( Pleurotus spp.) on the other hand, are the best choice for growing on straw. It’s resilient, adapting to different environments quickly, and can tolerate sunnier and drier conditions more readily than other species. Wine Cap (Stropharia rugosoannulata), also known as King Stropharia or Garden Giant, is especially adept at growing on wood chips in a backyard. Inoculating mulched paths and beds is a great way to bring mushrooms into your garden. Why keep your plants and mushrooms separate when they naturally support one another? Using the same method as making a mushroom bed, you can grow mushrooms alongside your vegetables, perennials, or in the shade of trees.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |