Environmental healing center.

As we move in to this new age of environmental awareness, millions of people are beginning to understand the importance of growing your own organic produce, as well as trying to lessen the amount of waste we produce by saving, and composting our food, paper, cardboard, and other such organic waste so that it can be recycled in to usable fuel for our plants, flowers and vegetables in the spring and summer months.

Because mushrooms are Mother Nature’s natural composting organisms, many wonderfully nutritious, great tasting edible varieties can be added to your compost, and then to your garden, to ensure a healthy return of vitamins, nutrients and immune system support back from all of your hard work throughout the season.

The easiest and most common variety of mushroom to start composting with is the Oyster mushroom.

These mushrooms grow naturally on decaying hard wood, but fruit prolifically on unsupplemented wheat straw, cardboard, woodchips, used coffee grounds, and an every growing list of other organic material that these delicious, nutrient packed treats will recycle in to usable compost for your garden beds.

To start, straw is chopped using a weed eater inside a garbage can to about 1 inch length pieces.

It is then wetted, and packed in to a food storage barrel, and then steamed using a propane turkey cooker for about an hour and a half at 170 degrees.

Once the straw is cooled, it is mixed with mushroom spawn that can be purchased from mushroom spore and culture vendors such as www.spores101.com.  Once you start your mushroom compost pile, you can simply continue to remove compost and add new scraps to the pile, and your culture will continue to flourish in the new, rotting debris.

If you are careful to start the pile at the right time of year “just after the last hard frost” then your colonized straw will have time to spread deep in to the earth, and the newly added food, yard scraps.

Once you have mixed your straw with the purchased grain spawn, simply pack it tightly into a few heavy duty garbage bags, which are sterile due to the manufacturing process.

Be sure to poke several small holes in the bag throughout the colonizing straw to avoid any anaerobic death.  Then place in a warm, preferably humid spot “to avoid drying out the areas near the holes you punched” for about one to two weeks.  Once you have a solid, white mass of mycelium around the straw inside the garbage bag, you can then break up these white masses and add them in to any compost pile in the spring.

The mushroom mycelium itself will actually help the plants and vegetables get the proper nutrients they need from the compost itself.  Because mushrooms only consume a tiny fraction of the material they are breaking down they are able to increase the usable supply of nutrients for the plant roots that would otherwise take years to break down enough to be use utilized.

garden mushrooms

In short, mushrooms break the usable parts of the newly made soil into much smaller pieces than they would otherwise be found.  Along with helping the root systems absorb these much needed nutes, they also consume and remove many of the commonly found soil toxins that are appearing in ever growing numbers in the soils around the globe.  Hydrocarbon pollution, fecal coliform bacteria, phosphorous, dioxin, as well as many other harmful toxins that would otherwise be taken up in to the fruits and vegetables, are literally consumed and broken in to harmless fungal sugars instead of being consumed by the family growing in the contaminated soil.

The pile itself will begin fruiting oyster as soon as the first warm weather begins for the season, and as long as it is kept moist, will continue to fruit well in to the summer months.  This will greatly increase the speed at which the waste material is broken down, which in turn increases the ability to lower the amount of garbage needlessly going to landfills!  Not to mention producing much healthier, beneficial, toxin free compost for your vegetables to thrive in.

The mushrooms should be harvested soon after mature to avoid bugs and other fungi from attacking them. They can be eaten just as regular buttons, and or dried to be used later in the winter months.

If you decide to dry some of your oyster mushrooms, simply put them in front of a fan until they are cracker dry, then jar and store for the winter. Soak in warm water for ten or fifteen minutes when you are ready to use them. Once they have soaked up the warm water, fry or stew as usual.

As long as you continue to leave a the very bottom portion of your pile, starting over with fresh scrap material on top each year, your pile will always give you beautiful, healthy, and best of all TASTY mushrooms, year after year.

Other very similar methods can be used to propagate other species to ensure a full spectrum harvest from the earliest days of spring to the bitter frosts of winter, keeping your cupboards stocked, and the kids safe from harmful soil pollution.

If you have any questions, please feel free to post and I will do my best to answer them the best I can.  Thanks for checking out the post!