Intern-al Workings

Saturday after the Farmer’s Market, we said farewell to Jessica, our 3-day-a-week WWOOFer since April.  She is off to experience other farms.  We will definitely miss her! Not to mention,  her meticulous weeding and wonderful baking. The critters, especially the cats, are bereft.

Late Sunday night, our 2011 interns, Bethany and Brendan arrived to spend a work day and do some wedding logistics planning. They awoke at dawn Monday morning to help me round up the meat chickens; it was the day of the dreaded event, the trip to the poultry processor.

Brendan caught the escapee.

Forty two meat chickens and three  additional roosters ready for their last adventure.  These are  Poulet Rouge/Freedom Ranger  chickens, and they have been such amiable and funny birds. They sound like kazoons when they crow, which is especially endearing.  They had become quite large, so will make generous, delicious roast chicken dinners. Even though I  have raised meat birds many times now, I still cried a bit when I delivered them.

While I drove the truckload of chickens to the processor, Bethany and Brendan weeded. It was a hot, sultry day and they took a well-deserved break in the shade of the grapevine. Their wedding (at Squash Blossom Farm!  is just  a month away, and they radiate happiness.

Hey, I saw that.

In the afternoon we sat down and talked wedding details.  So organized, Bethany has a portfolio of planning spreadsheets on Google docs. Everything looks under control so far, It is going to be so much fun.

All day, WWOOFer Lynette worked in the steamy hot kitchen, roasting and then freezing pans of tomatoes and making cheese.  I mowed the yard and pastures and when Rog got home he mowed the trail, where he found this beautiful, perfect giant puffball, which we shall eat tonight. Lynette was delighted - she is a major mushroom fan.

Up and Down

What’s up:
Our first two wine cap mushrooms from our tiny mushroom bed by the garden shed!

What’s down:
Half of a 50-foot tall ash tree, one of a line of ash trees that were planted for each of the Braasch children, probably in the 1970s.  They were visiting this, their childhood home, last weekend for the barn's birthday and told me that. They were saddened when I told them the ash trees are probably all doomed to the emerald ash borer in the coming years.

You can’t see the crown of the fallen portion, which  fills the space between a large red maple and the granary. This is precisely where the cows spent the previous day relaxing in the shade, but we hadn’t yet moved them to the front yard for the day. Lynette was working a short distance away in the garden when she was startled by the sudden tremendous crash.  There wasn’t even any wind. It could sort of make you lose your trust of trees when one randomly crashes to the ground near you.

Making a Mushroom Patch

This morning,  I finally had a chance to plant the mushroom patch in the garden. I ordered this jar of Winecap Mushroom  spawn growing on grain from Detroit Mushroom Co via EBay a month ago.  It arrived almost immediately- while we still had a foot of snow on the ground, so I kept it in its dark  shipping box, hoping it will be no worse for the waiting.

I have never grown or even tasted  Winecap Mushrooms before, but I recently met a new friend, Teresa Marrone, the author of a just-published book: Mushrooms of the Upper Midwest: a Simple Guide to Common Mushrooms, and she encouraged me to try them because they can be grown easily right in your garden. They are supposed to be are similar to portobello mushrooms in taste.

I decided to create a  small mushroom bed at the end of the stoop of the Unbearably Cute  Garden Shed. I used some vintage  wood logs that we found in the barn to create the border. The spawn did not come with any instructions and I found several different approaches in my online search, so I tried a blend of a few  suggested planting techniques. First, I laid down wet cardboard.

Then, I mixed half wood chips with half  semi composted compost. Getting the compost was the hardest part because i had to carry it by shovelfuls from the compost pile through the extremely muddy cow yard to my wheelbarrow.  The wheelbarrow never could have made it through the deep mud.  For wood chips I am using purchased pine bedding for chickens. I figure it is unlikely to be contaminated with spores from other mushrooms. I suspect the little blue mushrooms that always pop up on the compost pile might show up, but they will be easy to tell apart from the winecaps.

The compost-woodchip mixture is layered about 6 inches deep over the cardboard.

I added another thin layer of wood chips because the pine bedding is so fine, I was worried it might decompose too fast. Then I spread the mushroom spawn over the bed and covered everything with a layer of compost. I watered lightly because we are supposed to get rain this afternoon, but the bed should be kept well-watered.

The reading gnome and a toad have taken up residence in a corner of the mushroom patch, waiting for the mushrooms to emerge. If all goes well, we will have  mushrooms for our wood-fire pizza in just a few weeks.

Duck Stuffed with Mushrooms

These cute little mushrooms grow in the  old cow bedding, on the compost pile and in the  middle pasture where the cows get hay. I call them Mulch Mushrooms, but I don't know their real  name.  The cows and chickens have never paid any attention to them.

But every morning when I open the coop, the goose and duck make a beeline to find out if there are any  new mushrooms.  They gobble them up  in a feeding frenzy:

Mushroom Bonus!

After harvesting several delicious oyster mushroom crops  this past spring we figured they were done and finally gave up on them. The mushrooms were grown on toilet paper rolls, but after being  broken down by the mushrooms the rolls looked more like giant roasted marshmallows. We threw them in a pile in the woods on the off chance that another crop would sprout someday.  Yesterday Rog went for a walk in the woods and discovered that, with all the warm, drizzly weather the past week, the mushrooms have revived and we have yet another crop of beautiful mushrooms for our pizza.

Wild Mushrooms

This morning when I went out to feed the chickens I noticed that the two huge piles of composting livestock bedding had each sprouted a dense crop of thousands of mushrooms. They were kind of cute, about 6 inches tall, but I don't have a fungi identification book to figure out what kind they were.
Tonight when I returned to feed the chickens their supper there was no sign the mushrooms had ever been there. I doubt the chickens would have eaten them--I suppose they must have just shriveled up during the hot, hot afternoon and been reabsorbed into the compost.

The Lost Month

In the past month I have spent 11days in Guatemala,  followed by a week out of commission with a nasty respiratory infection, and the  past two weeks frantically trying to catch up on everything.  Plus, my camera  had to be sent in for repairs when I got home and I have been struggling through computer issues.  Thus, this poor blog has been sadly neglected.

I will try to get back on track with regular posting but to catch you up a bit, here are a few happenings from the past month:

a) We had the Willys truck towed in to have the brakes repaired by professionals.  Rog drove it home and I drove it around the neighborhood, but it is not ready for hauling stuff to the Farmers Market yet...

While I was in Guatemala, the maple sap ran.  Rog and Sara  collected sap form our two big silver maples and boiled it down but we only got enough sap (about 30 gallons) to make one gallon of syrup before the nights warmed up above 40 degrees and the sap stopped running.  Last year we made 3 gallons of syrup and that was barely enough --this is going to be one precious gallon of syrup!

The oyster mushrooms have been growing like crazy  Grain, infused with mushroom spawn, had been put into the center tubes of unbleached toilet paper rolls which had been immersed soaked  in boiling water.  They were kept in a cool dark room for 5 weeks. The the rolls were refrigerated for  a week, and finally placed in the light --where they began fruiting.   We have been enjoying the tasty mushrooms ever since on pizza, in salads, stir-fried, grilled in sauces...

The first mushroom harvest is now finished, but we expect to get a couple more "crops" before the toilet paper rolls are depleted. We will also try growing oyster and shitake mushrooms on  oak logs.

We have lost one daughter (Sara left for a film-making internship in North Carolina) and gained one daughter --Cadence returned from her adventure in Mexico a few weeks early.  Cadence travels light--she came home with just the clothes on her back and a lovely lute-like instrument called a "vihuela."  Her vihuela is larger than a mandolin but smaller than a guitar,  has a curved back and 5 strings. She has  learned to get some very sweet Latin sounds out of it.

When I left for Guatemala on March 11th, we had a foot and a half of snow on the ground. When I got home 11 days later, it was spring-- bare ground, greening up and balmy!   Now spring is in full force and we are frantically trying to keep pace. We have 8 flats of assorted peppers, tomatoes, onions, and other miscellaneous  veggies started, but we still have a lot of seeds to start.  With temps in the 70's it feels so late. We have to keep reassuring ourselves that we are not so far behind--it's only mid-April --it could still snow.

We have hauled a couple loads of compost from the  County compost site to the garden, We planted 50 bare-root June-bearing strawberries (wondering whether that will mean an abundance or not nearly enough berries.).  We mulched the  raspberries, which are leafing out nicely. Today Cadence planted peas and built a trellis for them. The garlic is about 6 inches tall and we will be able to harvest our first rhubarb this week!  You can see obvious growth from one day to the next --this is such an exciting time of year!

Oyster Mushrooms

Our newest crop is mushrooms! This afternoon we planted three kinds of oyster mushroom spawn in 18 rolls of toilet paper. It sounds like a kind of wacky idea until you realize mushrooms grow on dead trees and toilet paper is made from wood.

The mushroom project was an ingenious gift from our friend Pat, who thought it would be the perfect crop for a future pizza farm. The oyster mushroom spawn came in bags of grain, colonized by mycelium, that we have kept refrigerated since Christmas.
We used plain, simple toilet paper, no perfumes or dyes. Sara immersed each roll in boiling water until saturated, then set it onto a cooling rack. Once cooled, each roll was placed into a "spawn bag" - a plastic bag that has a small square filter patch to allow air exchange.
We filled the center of each toilet paper roll with the grain spawn, labeled each bag with the type of oyster mushroom (Italian Brown, Golden and Gray Dove) and closed up the top of the bag with a rubber band.
We put the planted bags in a cool dark room inthe basement. In three weeks we should see mycelium growth. Between the 4th and 6th week we will move the bags to the refrigerator for at least 48 hours. When we take them out, open them up to fresh air and leave them in a well-lit room, they will fruit in 7-14 days. Stay tuned for our mushroom crop update in 5or 6 weeks!

Our mushroom spawn came from Field and Forest Products, a small company in Wisconsin that sells many types of mushroom spawn and kits. Pat also sent us shitake mushroom plugs, which we will insert into logs a bit closer to spring.