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 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.

I had intended to get trees from Peterson’s, since it seems pretty clear that they have spent a lot of effort in breeding tasty fruits – they’ve actually patented their cultivars. Unfortunately, everyone else had the same idea I did and I discovered that they had sold out of every tree for 2008. I’m generally fairly patient, but I wasn’t going to wait a year to plant. The Kentucky State website pointed me to another nursery, Hidden Springs Nursery in Tennessee, that had good breeds. Importantly for me, they carried the Overleese cultivar, which is the parent stock for most of Peterson’s trees. Last November, I ordered three trees (you need at least two, because pawpaws are not self-fertile) – one Overleese, one Mango, and one Mary Foos Johnson. I chose Davis and NC-1 as alternates, but Annie at Hidden Springs let me know pretty quickly that barring something unusual, I should get my first choices and that they’d ship around the end of March.

That just left me with the task of getting the area ready to plant. This involved a lot of stump removal and trimming back of the scrubby spruces that were planted as a fence along the north property line. I had mentioned the thought of renting an auger to dig the holes for the trees, but I figured that I’d at least give it a go and see how far I could get. I was pleasantly surprised that I was able to get all three holes done in about 6 hours of digging, including the run-in with all the junk from the house’s previous owners.

The first two holes, I managed over the weekend, with a little help from Elder Daughter. We dug them about 2.75 feet deep by about the same in diameter. I’m hoping that this is a bit of overkill, but I’m intending to mix a little compost with the sandy clay of my backyard when I plant the trees, so I wanted a little extra space to work with. The nursery is shipping me 2′ saplings, so I ought to be in good shape.

I needed to move a woodpile in order to dig the third hole and so I’d thought to wait until this coming weekend to finish the project. That went out the window when I got a shipment notification from Hidden Springs this afternoon that my trees were going out today. I left work a little early and in about 3 hours this evening, I moved the woodpile and dug the last hole. The last hole disgorged its surprise right at about the 2.5′ mark – an egg storage tunnel of an ant colony. Elder Daughter was quite amazed at how deep the ants had dug and immediately exhorted me to dig out the queen so she could see it. I demurred on that.

I still need to get some more compost to spread around the base of the trees once they’re planted and I’m considering one of the nice little geotextile sheets to help keep the weeds from competing with the trees. I was a bit concerned about how well the trees would thrive in the clay in my yard, but heck – they’re native to the area. They’ve got to do ok with a little bit of the greasy red stuff that sits below the topsoil. And, to my amazement, I found that the red clay layer sits on top of a sandier, more water-permeable grey clay, as pictured to the right. Since I’ve never done this before, it will be a miracle if I don’t kill at least one of the trees, but I’m really excited about it. With any luck, we’ll start getting fruit in a couple of years.

I decided that simple was best. I went down to the lumber yard and got 4 equally sized pieces of 1×8s – each piece is a hair under 4′. Then, I stopped by Lowes and bought a $2 polyethylene drop cloth, 1 mil thickness. Then, with Meg’s help, I used wood screws to fashion the frame and sealed it using a water-borne acrylic coating. At this point, the frame looked like this:

I let this dry and then used a staple gun to attach two layers of the plastic sheeting. I figured that by doubling it over, I could create a warm pocket of air between the layers that would provide good insulation for the plants beneath. The sheeting was pretty fragile to the staples, so I wound up having to roll up the edges of the polyethylene to get enough material to fasten. That seemed to work pretty well, though, and the result is this:

Now, I need to measure how much heat I can trap underneath it. I’ll borrow a thermocouple from work one day after it gets cooler and measure how warm it gets under there at the end of the day. With any luck, it’ll trap enough heat to keep the germinating seeds happy during the early spring chill.

Update: I added some corner supports to the frame. While I was going for the “cheap, simple hack” version, without the corner supports, it was hard to lug about. See this post for details.