🍄 Growing mushrooms 🍄

When purchasing the house we were very pleased to find that it had so many fruit trees, the pear tree had wonderful fruit and shortly after moving in I experimented with several recipes.

Unfortunately the other trees, an apple and a cherry had been in situ for quite some time and their roots were starting to become a concern to the surrounding structures. Whilst I made apple cider vinegar from the apple tree, the cherries all got eaten by birds!

So when the decision was made to cut the trees down it provided an opportunity for the larger logs to be used in future woodworking projects and smaller logs could become inoculated with mushroom spawns for a future harvest.

🍄 inoculated tree stump

Kit from here

The accidental mushroom farm

An advert came up online for some free sawdust that had been used to grow mushrooms, as it was labelled “spent” I figured that everything was finished growing and I could use this sawdust as mulch for the garden. Much to my surprise and delight the mushrooms had only just started growing but had not had ideal conditions.

The quickly assembled farm from odds and ends

After bringing as many bags as would fit in the car it was obvious that something needed to be set up quickly.

I didn’t want the mushrooms to dry out so they went to the end of the garden where they would be shaded for most of the day and I can quickly throw up extra shade when needed.

The mushrooms were bursting out of the bags within days!