Add Fungi to Your Homestead Activities

Reader Contribution by David Goodman

A woman called me for some gardening advice a couple of weeks ago. She talked about various projects… fruit and vegetables, trees and shrubs… …and then she said something so horrible I stopped in my tracks. “I have mushrooms growing all over the place,” she related. “They’re everywhere!” “Really?” I replied, “That’s great!” “GREAT? Seriously? I hate them! I’ve been pulling them all and throwing them over the fence!”

Oh, the horror! The horror! I’ve heard this before, particularly with meticulous gardeners. Mushrooms pop up in the middle of a green lawn and they’re immediately hunted down and destroyed. Does that describe you, oh enlightened reader of Mother Earth News? I hope not!

The Underground Network of Mycelium

The average gardener sees mushrooms as if they were individual plants. He spots them in the yard and assumes they’re simply a single organism, or a group of organisms in a ring or a cluster. Rarely does he stop and wonder how deep their mycelium run. The truth of the matter is that mushrooms are simply the fruiting bodies of a creature that may be much larger than it appears at first, second or third glance. Their deep underground network may have been around long before you arrived on the scene.

Have you ever turned over a log or some mulch and seen wispy white fibers running through the wood? That’s the main body of the mushrooms, i.e. NOT the part getting thrown over the fence. In your garden, or better yet, your food forest, mushrooms and other fungi are tireless creators of soil and recyclers of hard-to-compost organic matter such as roots, logs and tough vegetable material. They digest rocks and release nutrition that plants can only dream of accessing.

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