3. Growing Mushrooms with Vegetables

Start growing mushrooms in the same plot as your vegetables! Learn how to plan a small polyculture plot in a garden bed built with reused and recycled materials.

TRANSCRIPT

Amyrose Foll: You don’t have to have a farm to have a really vibrant and productive garden. If you have a small space, you can do a lot of things with a little bit of space. So what we have here is a little bit of a polyculture bed. The logs in front of me serve a purpose. This was just a space at the new house behind our dining room.

[00:00:21] If you’re like me, there is a particular online retailer that we all know and dominates the industry. We get a lot of boxes because we live in the middle of nowhere. What do you do with all those boxes? You can compost them. You can recycle them. They are my weed control. So we have used layers of cardboard that have been delivered here because grocery stores are not convenient for us to do some weed control here.

[00:00:48] We used ChipDrop because you can now order logs and full trees for $20 for a whole dump truck full to get some things delivered to you. I opted for logs. [00:01:00] Spring and summer is the best time to do that because the sap is running in the trees. So you can get firewood Bolt wood. You wanna assess for how well w- assess for disease, look at the bark, make sure there’s good bark.

[00:01:17] You can tell when it was cut or when the tree died. These were live oaks that were taken from a nearby house, delivered to our house for 20 bucks for a whole dump truck full of them. Perfect for bolt wood. Mushroom bolt wood’s very expensive. So all these logs, which also double as our border around our online retailer cardboard that we’re using for weed control, are going to be producing mushrooms.

[00:01:42] On top of the mushrooms, the mycorrhizal fungal mat will go into this garden bed, and it is going to help our plants grow. We’ve got some little marigolds here. We’ve got marigolds here, and then we’ll put some more on the edges. That will help with our [00:02:00] nematodes in this small space, and we’ve got beans that’ll help for nitrogen.

[00:02:05] We’ve got eggplant, peppers, kale, cabbages down low and up front so that these guys will grow up. The peppers and the eggplants will be about yea high. And the great thing about that is that direction is the southwestern sun. So we have brassicas. Brassicas are on the backside of the eggplants and the peppers, so when they grow up, they are going to shield these brassicas, keep them from bolting, provide shade.

[00:02:36] So you’re gonna get these plants to do the work for you. And that’s why we have the cabbages down low here too, because we’re gonna maximize the space here. These are just little French marigolds, so they’re only gonna get about yea high. They’re not big African marigolds or firecrackers. And we’ve got some bush beans kinda over in the corner there.

[00:02:56] So we’re getting one, two, three, four, five different [00:03:00] kinds of vegetables out of this area. Plus marigolds are just lovely. They’re great for pest management in this area too. They can actually… And you could do… no, I was gonna say you could do mint. Mint is great for keeping raccoons and rats and things like that away, but it gets out of control, and it will very easily take over this whole bed.

[00:03:20] So I would probably actually just do annuals. If you have a small space, something like this, I don’t know, this is maybe what, eight square feet? Pretty small. But in these logs, we’ve got white oaks, and in these logs we’ve got four dowels that have been inoculated for oysters and shiitakes. And once you do this, this whole thing actually took me about 45 minutes to put together.

[00:03:47] I just used a razor blade to flatten the boxes, put multiple layers down, few d- bags of dirt dumped in there. I think this little area with all these plants took me maybe two, three [00:04:00] bags of just regular potting soil. And I did use potting soil. I did not use topsoil, did not use garden soil because I’m not putting anything else in here.

[00:04:10] So the potting soil, because this is basically just a big pot. It’s above ground. There was nothing else in here. So I got, used potting soil. It’s got all the nutrients to f- feed the plants for six months. I don’t have to worry about it. It’s like an Easy-Bake Oven. Set it and forget it. So they’re in here.

[00:04:28] Pop those plants in with a little bit of strategy because I wouldn’t wanna put the brassicas towards the late sun. Southwestern sun is the hottest sun of the day here in Virginia. When it’s 100 degrees outside at the end of July or the beginning of August, you don’t wanna burn those plants. So these guys are gonna provide shade.

[00:04:49] They’re all gonna work together. And even the border is edible because that fungus is going to inoculate these logs. And something this big, these are pretty big for [00:05:00] bolt wood. Normally, you wanna have eight to 10 inches. Because I used ChipDrop to just get whatever I could get, Some of them are pretty big.

[00:05:08] So they’re only about a foot long or so, maybe 18 inches, but they’ve large diameter. When you are drilling your holes and putting these dowels in to inoculate the logs for fungus, what is happening is the fungus is gonna feed off of the sap that was in this wood when it was cut down. So that’s the food source for this fungus.

[00:05:32] For an 8 to 10-inch log, you’re gonna have couple seasons. It takes about 12 months for this to do its thing. If you’re really lucky and you have great weather, sometimes you can get inoculation in the spring, maybe a late fall or early winter flush, especially for oysters. I had shiitakes do that last year in the woods across the street.

[00:05:53] These are really big in diameter, which is not normal. You wouldn’t wanna do this if you’re gonna do a log [00:06:00] cabin style or tipi style bolt wood setup for outdoor mushroom production. So these should actually last three or four years ideally. Basically, I just dump the dirt in, strategize where the plants were gonna go after I put these in a little border, and just let it, it’s gonna do its thing.

[00:06:18] It’s so easy. You don’t have to make it complicated. But there are all these little tips and tricks you can use because that mycorrhizal fungal mat that’s going to form below the plants is gonna help them transfer nutrients to each other. It’s how the plants talk to each other, with the exception of the brassicas.

[00:06:37] Brassicas are very interesting. They’re one of the only plants that actually do not use fungus or the mycelium network to trade nutrients or talk to each other. It’s fascinating. But that doesn’t mean that they can’t go in here, and it doesn’t mean that this is not useful for a host of other reasons.

[00:06:55] And the great thing about this is I specifically did oysters and shiitake. [00:07:00] So we did in the white oak oyster mushrooms. They sometimes will produce a couple flushes a year. And shiitakes, in Japan, shiitakes are, that are winter shiitakes, are the most highly sought after type of sh- shiitakes. You can talk to any mushroom grower that’s seasoned, a shiitake mushroom that was harvested in the wintertime is really heavy and dense.

[00:07:25] It has a different flavor profile. They hold up better in cooking. Whereas the summer shiitakes are almost They’re really lighter and fluffier, and they will have a lo- or a shorter cooking time. But there’s also evidence of higher nutrient value in the winter mushrooms as well. And any mu- mushrooms actually, you can go on government websites and find research about mushrooms, even down to button mushrooms that you find in the grocery store.

[00:07:53] People that eat mushrooms on a regular basis have a reduced risk of cancer, and even for just [00:08:00] generally farmed button mushrooms. So this is gonna provide me with all of that nutrition. It’s going to produce into the wintertime. I overwinter my kale usually here. We are zone 7A, I think, here in the Mid-Atlantic in this area.

[00:08:15] But this is going to be pretty much a year-round garden with the exception of January and February. So this is a great option. Logs, boxes, I don’t wanna name the reta- retailer, just a couple bags of dirt and a few plants to plug in, maybe a dozen plants in here. And because you’re doing plants of varying height, you’re gonna maximize your space so they can work together and not compete with each other.