This year, one of the most inspiring recipients of the MacArthur Fellowship is an agriculturalist named Will Allen. His non-profit, Growing Power, maintains an urban farm in Milwaukee, providing fresh vegetables to the residents of the distressed inner city there. Regular readers here will note that I have a strong interest in urban agriculture and small-lot permaculture, so it is especially rewarding to see the MacArthur Foundation take interest in the kind of project that Will Allen is leading.

The New York Times published a great article about a month back on Will Allen and Growing Power and MAKE magazine has the video of an interview with him.

Just like the beds I planted earlier with fall mustard greens and sugar snaps, I went through where the fennel, basil and tomatoes were and dug the bed. In a slacker version of John Jeavons’ recommendation, I simply went along with a spade and loosened the top 20 cm or so of soil. Jeavons would have recommended pulling that dirt out, then using a broadfork to loosen the subsoil. I didn’t have time for that, so I didn’t go to that length. Since I still have very little topsoil, most of what I loosened up was huge chunks of clay. I added about a centimeter or two of compost, most of which came from my own compost bin, and mixed that into the top layers of soil as I broke up the giant clods of clay. Once I got that done, I inoculated an envelope of fava beans and planted them in the loosened bed. I’m still of two minds about the favas. Half of me wants to till them under in the early spring to add organic matter to the soil on top of the nitrogen they will be fixing all winter and the other half wants to have fresh favas in the spring. No need to make a decision at this point, though.

My peppers are producing like mad, and I still have blossoms. M. and I harvested three gorgeous Nardello peppers on Friday, one of which we ate on the way back to the house, another wound up in a breakfast omelet and the last wound up in a veggie quesadilla along with some fresh shiitakes from my CSA share. The Cuban peppers are putting out another flush right now, which should be ready in a week or so, and my red bell peppers are a few days from being picked. Identical plants that I gave to my back door neighbor have been producing like crazy for the past two weeks, so I’m taking that as a sign that my soil is a bit tapped out right now.

I’m leaving Monday for Chicago again. We’ve decided to lease an apartment up there for the summer, since sublets are fairly cheap now. One of my teammates will be relocating for 2 months, which will mean a lot more work will get done in the lab in Chicago. It will present a logistical hurdle, one that we’ll certainly overcome. For the amount we’re saving, both in total dollars and in dollars per man-hour, it’s a win-win situation.

Not too shabby.

I ordered my plug spawn from Fungi Perfecti, a neat company near Olympia, WA. They’ve got spawn for lots of different strains of mushrooms, but I love shiitakes and shiitakes love hardwoods. The spawn arrive in a little bag like the picture on the right. The spawn themselves are small dowels, about 1.5″ long, with a spiral groove cut into the side. You can clearly see the white mycelia from the shiitake in the groove. There is also some grain in the bag as well, which I surmise are how the dowels were inoculated.

I had ordered my spawn about a month ago, so by the time I pulled the bag out, there was plenty of mycelial growth in the bag, which you can see in the picture on the left as the white matting around the dowels. According to the instructions, this is normal and probably wouldn’t have been so bad if I’d used the spawn more quickly. Fortunately, no mushrooms had begun to bud, so I didn’t have to pull those off.

When I pulled all my stuff out to start the project, I hadn’t read the instructions carefully enough. I needed a 5/16″ drill bit to make the holes in the logs for the dowels. Unfortunately, my little B&D cordless drill’s largest bit was 1/4″. I already had a rubber mallet to tap the dowels into the log and I’d stopped by a fabric store a few weekends back and gotten some untreated burlap to cover the logs with to help them retain moisture. All I needed at this point was that drill bit. A quick stop by Northern Tool solved that problem, and I could get down to log selection.

It’s best to get longer, larger logs. I didn’t have anything shorter than 14″, since the arborist’s crew cut the branch wood to firewood length. I don’t think that’s a huge problem, though. What was more important is that the wood not already be inoculated with competitor fungi. This means that I selected from logs that had not been touching the ground and that didn’t show any splotchiness at the end. None of the logs showed any major saprophytic growth – no turkey tails or other polypore mushrooms like you’d expect on rotting logs. Most of them had the lichen-like surface growth in some places – this was on the tree when it was still erect. I brushed most of it off and hoped that the shiitakes would out-compete anything left.

I also didn’t know how many logs I could plug. I had 100 dowels – the smallest order I could make. I figured that would make about 5 logs, since the holes needed to be spaced fairly closely at about 4″. I drilled a few test holes into the first log and tapped the dowels in, pretty much like I the picture to the right. The mallet collapsed the mycelial growth at the end of the dowel, but slid into the hole without a problem. The spiral grooves will hopefully have protected the mycelia inside them from collapse. Elder Daughter, who had come outside to help me, was able to tap in most of the dowels, even with her cast on, which she enjoyed doing.

At this point, I could have covered the holes with a dab of hot, food-grade wax. I didn’t do that, which means that I’ll probably need to keep a more careful eye on my logs to keep them wet and to keep ants from trying to eat the mycelia. If the ants start bothering the logs – well, I have some diatomaceous earth with their names on it.

I wound up stuffing some of the extra mycelial mass from the bag into the holes in front of some of the dowels. I drilled slightly deeper holes into the log to accommodate the extra “stuff.” I don’t know if that will help speed along the inoculation or not, but I figured it might and it wouldn’t hurt. The picture on the left shows the first two logs completely pegged. Each log took between 16 and 20 plugs, which means I had enough to plug 6 logs – though the last log only got 9 plugs, which hopefully will be enough to get good colonization of the wood.

At this point, I needed to get the logs good and wet and cover them up. I set them under the garden sprinkler for a little bit, then wrapped them in the burlap. I moved the whole package to the shady side of my garden shed, and used a watering can to put about four more gallons of water over the whole thing. This soaked the burlap through so it wouldn’t wick water away from the logs. The instructions recommend that the whole thing be watered once a week, depending on how arid the climate is, and whether you used wax on the holes. I’ll check it a little more frequently, since I know I’ve got a very healthy ant colony nearby.

If all goes well, the logs will be fully colonized in somewhere between 6 and 12 months. At that point, I can encourage a fruiting by applying a lot of water and a little sunlight. This went well enough and I have enough logs left that I’m considering ordering more plugs, even though I have no idea what I’ll do if I get that many shiitakes! I have a couple of friends to whom I may give ready-to-fruit logs, assuming all goes well. And well, I do love shiitakes, so not having to pay out the nose for them will rock. The only question is whether I’ll get mushrooms this year or next.

And just in time too, since its supposed to be right at freezing tonight and tomorrow night.

At the end of the growing season last year, I seeded the plot with crimson clover as a green mulch and leaf mulched the swiss chard in hopes of having some of it survive the winter. This spring, when I started planting, I noticed that the soil seemed much healthier – black and a bit deeper, and nicely crumbly. Most excitingly, when I was digging up some of that weird 6-leaved running ground cover that had crept in from the edges, I found that I couldn’t lift a spade of soil without turning up at least one earthworm. Fantastic!