L Fletcher

hey david,

these mushrooms grow on black locust all my area too! they are a phellinus species. used by different first nations people as an ideal source of timber, they can hold embers for a long ass time. i feel like i've read a bit about their use as a medicinal incense also by first nations people, and about their ash being mixed with tobacco as a kind of snuff. since they're a polypore, the living white part on the underneath of the mushroom likely has some medicinal compounds but i don't think that's been studied too much. you could check this video if you wanna see someone using a similar polypore as a prehistoric lighter lol

i always thought they gotta be pretty powerful cuz they rot something nothing else can. haven't played around with it too much but i've seen springtails (tiny soil critters) eating em out in the deep woods during the snow melt so i always kind of played with the idea that they might be a really nice soil builder. if the underside has turned brown or black the mushroom's dead and i wouldn't feel too bad about burning it or composting it if that strikes your fancy. if it's white on the underside it's still living and sending out spores so i personally would let it do its thing!

as far as not eating something growing out of black locust, i've heard that too but paul stamets mentions growing reishi out of black locust and says nothing about that so idk?

hope you're having fun exploring with fungi!

hey what's going on?

i'm wondering what type of (especially nitrogen-rich) plants you've had growing in your mulch.

i'm getting about 16,000 pounds of shredded hardwood leaves dumped at this sunny, pastured lot soon, to start sculpting into garden beds.
here in hot and humid southern maryland, i'd like to be trying to get those leafy beds mostly converted into humus by the end of the year. issue being: i dont have much in the way of nitrogen-rich compost activators around here.

i've seen humus form quickly in my leafy compost piles in my patch of the woods around here, with lots of worms and millipedes and stuff, eating through and leaving their bacteria-rich casts to work through the leaves in our wet, warm seasons. SO my main idea is to get lots of worm breeding happening in the garage on some of those shredded hardwood leaves, and then use these worm breeding bins to "inoculate" my leafy piles with the worms' bacterial casts, raising up the nitrogen in my piles.

after i get that top layer of compost on my piles though, i'm wondering what to sow. i've seen mulleins and dandelions grow in straight mulch around here, as well as certain types of grasses. what's your opinion on clovers/comfrey/oats making their way through these piles? what type of plants have you seen draw nutrients up from mulches before? i'm thinking i can grow lots of potatoes this year, and squashes too if i get some alpaca manure on those leaf piles. but i'd love to pull up nutrients with grasses/dynamic accumulators/nitrogen fixers that'll give structure to my beds. do you feel any hollow-stemmed grass like oats/barley/wheat/rice could work? i'd love to get a harvest of straw for my mushroom cultivation projects. let me know what you've observed!