Mushrooms are blooming

With all the rain we've had in West Michigan over the past few weeks, combined with a very warm October, there have been mushrooms popping up all over. Before this year, I hadn't given them much thought. I've had the excitement of finding a bunch of morels on rare occasions. I've tried the "stumpies" that grow around a dead tree back home when my parents would cook them. Other than that, I've only really experienced store-bought mushrooms. But something amazing happened this year that has opened my eyes to mycology!

Looks appetizing!

Earlier this summer I realized I was going to need a significant amount of compost to fill 4 new garden beds. I found a listing on Marketplace for free mushroom mulch. Me thinking it was mushroom compost, immediately jumped on it. What I found was a six-foot-tall pile of plastic bags filled with foul-smelling brown water and slimy blocks of, uh, something? This was the extent of my mycological knowledge (I didn't even know the word 'mycological' yet!)

I get my trailer-load of mushroom spawn bags home and start researching how to use it in compost. Essentially it works as a super-powered brown compost. As brown compost, it provides carbon to the mix, retains water in the garden, and helps aerate the pile to allow the greens to break down. The superpower comes from the fungus mycelium that will grow through the compost helping break it down with the worms, insects, and bacteria. I tore open the bags, broke apart the mulch, and mixed it into a giant pile of yard clippings I picked up from my wife's mom's house. On a whim, I set one bag off to the side to see if I can maybe try to grow a mushroom from it.

Since then, my life has been inundated with everything mushroom! I've started a bucket mushroom garden from that one bag and gotten 5 flushes (crops) of white elm oyster mushrooms. I've inoculated several garden beds and mulched walkways with various types of gourmet mushroom species from the compost pile. I've gone on several wild mushroom foraging excursions with experts to learn how to identify edible varieties. I've read books, watched documentaries, and downloaded multiple apps on my phone to learn everything I can.

One of my favorite things about fungi is the possible health benefits. I am constantly searching for certain varieties to try drying and encapsulating for an immune boost, such as Turkey Tail and Hen of the woods (these things seem to have a lot of bird-related names.) 

Disclaimer: before running off into the woods and trying something you read on a blog, please ensure you do plenty of research!

There are plenty of benefits of incorporating mushrooms into the garden too. Aside from simply growing them to eat, fungi are an important part of permaculture and food forest setup. The mycelium spread through the entire ground layer and help break down organic materials. 

This helps the perennials collect the nutrients from old plant material. They also allow root systems of trees and shrubs to communicate! There has been research that suggests trees can communicate with each other via mycelial connections, or "mycorrhizal networks" and share carbon with each other. These networks also take up sugars that the plants have created and exchange them for phosphorus and nitrogen, which the plant needs to grow. 

I'm excited to have introduced fungi into my gardening and will be updating on the progress. It's fun to learn a whole new field of cultivation, as well as grow and eat varieties that you don't often find in the store.