Mycelium growing!

Well, our holiday quickly transformed into a pile of orders and things to catch up with at day work and in our handmade paper business.

That's all good, but with the added pressure of canning and freezing all the produce from the garden, along with caring for the kids, it seems I'm very behind with the photos I share with you all!

So let's go back a few weeks in time!

What you see on the photo above is wine cup mushroom mycelium! We got a handful mycelium from a friend in early spring. We spread it on cardboard layered with boiled wood chips. At some time in summer we dug into the the chips pile and we were happy to find out that the mycelium is growing...!

The main problem is that we have had no rain since mid-summer and even though the pile is placed under a tree with mixed shadow it dries out very quickly. We don't have a quick and easy way to water it so we tried to pour a few buckets of water on top of the pile each weekend.

We must have done something right because at a certain point a few small mushrooms appeared! I was overjoyed! Of course we did not collect those and left them spread their spores.

In August we didn't manage to water the pile and also we went camping for two weeks so the pile is now mostly dry. Only under very bottom of it there is some moisture.

To make things worse we have had 0 rain in September which is typically quite a wet month. So we're back to watering those chips by hand.

Our friend advised us to build the pile up instead of sideways in order to retain better moisture. We will certainly try that as soon as we manage to find more fresh wood chips.

We are also hoping that October will bring some rain and and water the whole landscape thoroughly.

Our long-term plan is to be able to grow wine cap mushrooms all over the micro forest we have at the bottom of our plot!

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