Recreating the bounty of the wild
I'm sometimes surprised by
how bountiful the uncultivated portions of our farm are. Thursday
morning, I startled thirty wild turkeys who were hunting for bugs in
our woods. Then, while helping Mark split firewood, I looked up
and saw this box-elder chock full of wild oyster mushrooms. Taken
together, the turkeys and mushrooms would have made a bountiful
meal...if I'd had a gun with me on my walk and if the mushrooms weren't
fifteen feet up in the air.
Luckily, we can recreate
that bounty in a more easily harvestable fashion. I thawed a
homegrown chicken out of the freezer and plucked yet another flush of
shiitakes off our mushrom
raft.
Permaculture gives us the best of both worlds --- high quality meat fed
partially from wild insects plus micronutrient-rich mushrooms grown on
woods-harvested logs, all right at my fingertips.
Our chicken waterer makes care of the flock
nearly as easy as hunting a wild turkey.
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About us:
Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.
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Sara and Molly --- We've been working on low tech ways of creating your own spawn for the last couple of years with varied success. If you want to do it right and have money to set up a sterile lab, you should buy Paul Stamets' Growing Gourmet and Medicinal Mushrooms.
On the other hand, if you want something you can do on the backyard scale, I recommend making cardboard spawn. We're still working the kinks out of it, but did have our first fruits from homegrown spawn this year, so it has potential! The hardest part at the moment is dealing with seasonality --- mushrooms fruit at the wrong time of year to be inoculating other logs, and spawn doesn't like sitting around and waiting until the right time of year.
Sara is right on track about selecting wild strains that do particularly well. So far, we've mostly been simply propagating the cultivated strains that started a few years ago as storebought spawn, but this past spring we did start a wild oyster mushroom that we thought had particular cold hardiness.