Mushroom News, Perennial Potato/Mushroom Beds, Foraging Season & DIY Vitamin D Supplements.
Its been a busy growing season! Now that we are into autumn, mushrooms, both wild & cultivated are emerging as the stars of the harvest season.
Thus far, some of you who got mushroom kits from me this spring have reported back to say you have had some good crops from the beds, some as early as beginning of July. Ample wet weather on the east side of the county certainly helped in that regard. Some said they were inundated with some furious flushes of King Stropharia & on top of eating fresh from the garden they were then also busy making mushroom soups & stews for the freezer! Excellent! 👏
I also spoke to a couple of folk from other parts of the county that had yet to get a big flush & had only just a few so far. Many factors can play into this, siting, rainfall etc. I had heard it apparently has been drier in the north & west of the county compared to the east & rainfall at the correct time is going to play a huge part. If you are one of those people, a gentle few rakes of the surface of the bed & a very thorough watering can often shock the bed into fruiting. Or else, just wait, it will happen eventually. 👍 This is just part of growing mushrooms in an uncontrolled environment, outdoors with nature in charge.
I spent spring & early summer herding mycelium around the croft, making lots of wood chip, constructing further mushroom beds, germinating spores & experimenting with mycelium expansion on cardboard. I'm currently also running a propagation experiment with spores & stem end mycelium from oyster mushrooms I found growing in the wild a few miles south of Lybster earlier this year. I hope to be able to expand this out & start growing this local strain on a bigger scale as well.
Before I had really properly advertised the “Lughnasdh Buckets”, I had a few orders for these & quickly all were spoken for. I had a limit of how many I'd manage to do as there is quite a bit of preparation work involved & then maintenance to get them pinning about to fruit.
Perennial potato & mushroom bed experiment.
Probably the mushroom experiment I enjoyed the most this season. 1st part of the 2 year experiment is now partially complete & the results were very interesting. Can you grow tatties in fresh wood chip? Well.. I guess it turns out you can. 😊 But, the experiment showed many ways already to improve production.
Pockets were scooped out in the mushroom bed to plant the chitted seed potatoes. I'll note here that you of course have to break through the mycelial mat to make the planting pockets but, King Stropharia mycelium is completely unfazed by this disturbance & if anything, disturbance triggers it into vigourous regrowth after filling in the holes with more wood chip. Therefore, harvest of potatoes later in the year is also only a momentary disturbance of the mycelial mat.
I chose the violet splashed 'Kestrel' 2nd early variety, bred by the Caithness potato breeder, Jack Dunnett, because of its well known slug resistance. Slug resistance is probably going to be the most important factor for the future of the few potato tubers being left in the bed after harvest to overwinter.
Going by the above photo, all seems to be going swimmingly well. As I had imagined, the mushrooms would pop up just next to the stem of the plant which would provide some shade & retain moisture for ideal flushing conditions for the mushrooms. However, the reality is that the comfrey did more of this job than the potato plant because when we zoom out on the bed we see the tale of two sides.
On the left, we have our healthy looking potato plants (& comfrey) & mushrooms appearing & on the right side, things aren't looking looking too wonderful at all. The potato plants are tiny, pale & wabbit & unsurprisingly, no mushrooms were to be seen. 😌 Up until this point, I had not watered the bed once since planting it. I did begin to water more from the time of the photo onward because of lack of rain but, by this time I did not hold out much hope of much of potato harvest from the plants on the right & also wondered if any mushrooms would flush on that side considering I didn't have larger potato plants (or comfrey) to partially shade the area. We began to get more rain from July so, I watered very minimally from then on until harvest.
As expected, the plants that struggled on the drier side of the bed produced few potatoes & no mushrooms yet at that side either but, the ones growing near the comfrey produced a decent little harvest with plenty of mushrooms harvested there as well. Not bad for growing in fresh wood chip & no soil whatsoever. I immediately replanted 8 of the best looking potatoes back into the holes from which I harvested them from in the mushroom bed where these will overwinter & all being well should sprout next spring. After replanting these potatoes, I chipped some fresh downy birch wood chip & topped up the bed to feed the mycelium for winter & make sure the potatoes are well protected from frost.
Are you surprised potatoes would grow just in fresh wood chip & no soil or compost? I was! 😂 I honestly was not expecting much at all this 1st year.
For many years already, I had been using potatoes to clear ground of grass simply by throwing potatoes on the ground & covering with a deep layer of mulch, usually old or left over silage & straw. In this method though, the plants have access to nutrients in the soil below the mulch. This works quite well as a method for growing “no dig” potatoes. But, the haphazard way I was growing these to clear ground invariably meant I had volunteer potato plants popping up all over the next year from potatoes that were missed during harvest the year before. Sometimes I'd get a huge crop from these volunteer potato plants, especially the red 'Rooster' variety. Potatoes are technically perennials & I had been contemplating trying to grow potatoes as perennials instead of the normal annual method for many years because of my previous experience with the volunteer plants & never intentionally tried it until this year. When I had done a bit of research on it, I found there were some people experimenting with it different ways & I even found some doing it in composted wood chip which they would top up with fresh wood chip as mulch every year (the 'Back to Eden' method) & they were getting some incredible harvests. But, to me, it looked like a missed opportunity to not combine that method with edible mushroom growing. So, here we are. 😊
Did the comfrey at the productive side of the patch help things along in ways other than providing shade & retaining moisture? Comfrey is an incredible fertiliser but, seeing as the potatoes weren't in contact with the soil I think its very unlikely to have been much of a factor this time around. See below for more on this…
However, next year, the bottom of the mushroom/potato bed will have rotted down & decomposed considerably at the bottom of it. Its likely that harvests should get better every year as more nutrients are made available to the plants.
That wasn't the only experimental potato/mushroom bed I did this year either….
This was a much smaller bed, just a strip along a woodland edge with 3 seed potatoes in it. Again, the potato plants looking very healthy & mushrooms flushing near the base of this plant. We have lady's mantle & wild garlic growing up close to the bed performing the same job as we saw with the comfrey in the other bed. It is also growing in no soil or compost whatsoever, just in fresh wood chip mixed with mycelium on top of cardboard. I have yet to harvest these potato plants as I will wait for them to die completely back before doing so this time but, I expect an ok harvest from these as well.
The next part of the experiment of course is waiting until next spring to see how the overwintered potato tubers perform.
Going by what I've learned thus far, my next step will be designing & planting a large plant guild incorporating fruit & nut trees & smaller fruit shrubs with an understory of perennial potatoes & mushroom mycelium, likely King Stropharia again but, perhaps an oyster variety may get a look in on this as well. As I know already the mushroom/potato bed benefits greatly being planted closely with other plants I will be planning a list of mutually beneficial productive crops in amongst the potatoes. Alliums are likely to be at the top of this list as they are a companion plant to both fruit trees as well as potatoes & so I already plan to intersperse perennial leeks, walking onions, elephant garlic & a selection of others like welsh onions & everlasting onions in about it. Alliums are also a good defence against a wide range of pests. A range of herbs & flowers will also feature in the guild.
The goal of the plant guild project will be to see if a perennial potato bed can provide a reliable & ample crop of potatoes wherein I can then stop growing them as annuals altogether. It will be a far more efficient & less intensive method of growing this important staple crop on a small scale if so.
Foraging Season
September is peak mushroom foraging season & one of my favourite times of year. I often combine foraging sessions with tree seed collection & its a great time to travel around the Far North & some years further to some of our favourite foraging spots. “We” nowadays usually means myself & my daughter. She, like me, had developed the “mushroom bug” from a young age likely from just being regularly involved in mushroom foraging trips plus eating & cooking with a wide range of varieties of mushrooms her entire life.
My next door neighbour growing up was a Finnish man who had a great love of the outdoors & the Finns really know their mushrooms. I would see him every autumn appearing out of the woods behind our houses with big buckets full of mushrooms. When I was about 12, I asked him about them & he started showing me which ones were edible, which ones to avoid & where to find them & gave me a mushroom identification book. That interest never left me as later in life I took a few mycology classes at the Botanic Gardens in Edinburgh & my husband and I would spend every autumn mushroom foraging roundabouts Edinburgh, places like Roslin Glen & East Lothian & further afield, often in Perthshire. Nowadays, with phone identification apps, foraging for mushrooms is a bit more accessible to those new to it. 20 years ago, if you found something new & still hadn't managed to identify it 100% after flipping through many id books several times & doing spore prints, the last resort was visiting the knowledgeable man that worked at the Italian deli in Elm Row on a Wednesday to get his opinion on it. 😊Part of the fun for me of our foraging trips was the study of new subjects you had found as well as finding loads of chants, blewits, shaggy ink caps or porcini & going home to preserve them & enjoy the spoils of the forage. My husband doesn't even really like eating mushrooms that much. 😂 Nonetheless, the annual foraging season has been a constant & this year is no different. My daughter on the other hand enjoys both foraging & eating mushrooms. She probably wouldn't elaborate if you asked her, but, her culinary interests are much more adventurous than mine & her current favourite cuisine genre is Japanese & she experiments with cooking both foraged seaweed & mushroom Japanese dashi broths & noodle dishes. Looks like we'll be growing shiitake on both alder & willow logs now this coming season for some of her recipes.
Did you know that you can make your own Vitamin D supplements for winter by exposing the gills or pores of mushrooms to the sun for several hours? This works with many types of edible mushrooms & some species convert more Vitamin D than others but, I tend to do it most years with porcini (Boletus edulis) because boletes benefit taste wise by drying them before being used to cook with. You simply thinly slice them & lay them on a tray outside or turn the whole mushroom cap upside down facing the sun for a few hours. Around 9 hours I believe is considered the optimum time, but, even in the 1st 15 minutes of sun exposure, the Vitamin D levels rise dramatically!
See here:
Photobiology of vitamin D in mushrooms and its bioavailability in humans.
If anyone is looking to have a go growing some mushrooms this coming season, I'm likely to have several types of oyster mushrooms spawn kits available as well as the King Stropharia. These will be available from late winter into early spring. If you already have a kit & need more fresh chip to top up your beds for next season. This will be available from December 1st as well.
Happy growing & foraging! 👍