Fred's photos from Wheaton Labs

A few years ago, in the fall, we found several shaggy mane (Coprinus comatus) mushrooms growing alongside a nearby dirt road. Some fungi can concentrate heavy metals from the soil, so we thought it would be best not to eat the ones right on the road. Instead, we collected them to spread the spores somewhere with cleaner soil. The shaggy mane is a kind of inky cap mushroom and within a day or two of popping up the cap starts to deliquesce. That is, it sort of melts into a black inky mess that helps to spread its spores. We diluted that inky goop and splashed it on hugels around the abbey. This fall there were quite a few that popped up after the last rain. I missed most of them and only got to eat a few. I'm happy this low-tech method worked out and now those mushrooms will keep growing around the abbey.

I've seen recipes that use the black ink to color homemade pasta. Maybe there are other uses if you also miss the short window of regular edibility.

Apparently this fungus is known to kill and eat nematodes including the peanut root knot nematode. Could be worth spreading to your garden too.

This year, since i missed the window to eat many of the mushrooms, i collected the ink and some of the remaining caps that were in the process of autodigestion. I diluted that and splashed it over the hugels on my plot. Hopefully they will take and in a year or three i'll be harvesting shaggy manes there too.

I'm still sorting through mushroom pics and today was the first day of a week of rain. So...expect more mushroom pictures! Here's a few for today. The first two are from my plot and the third is from the path between the abbey and teepee.

Over much of the lab and basecamp creeping Oregon grape (Mahonia repens) is a large part of the groundcover layer. This plant has been widely used medicinally for it's antibacterial, anti-tumor, and many other effects, . One component of its root/root bark is berberine. It gives the roots their distinctive yellow color. It is BITTER, and when you make a tea from the roots, it tastes like medicine! It spreads from deep horizontal roots and has been hard to eliminate from my garden area. That just means i get to harvest more medicine.

It is evergreen, but most of the leaves turn a variation of purple for the winter, greening again in the spring. Many birds and mammals eat the berries. Most things won't bother eating the leaves until deepest winter.

I made bread again. This time I had reseasoned my cast iron pot. I took a photo before taking the bread out of the pans, in case it got stuck again.  The bread slipped right out of both pans. I figured I'd include a photo before and after so people could see the pans I used. This batch I opened a new bag of "bread flour ". It said it was 100% white whole wheat. It rose a little slower, but that was probably just because of lower indoor temps. For some reason, I didn't like the flavor of this bread as much. 23lbs to go until we can switch back to the other flour. Maybe there's an amendment that can make bread from it more flavorful?

While hiking I found this balloon in the woods. Pretty sure no one had a party there. Please don't let your helium balloons float away. There is no away.

Here's a few bracket fungi for today.

The first two photos are at a nearby creek. Growing at the base of what was maybe a dead rocky mountain maple.

The third photo is growing on the exposed end of one of the logs that's part of a hugel on my plot. That log didn't get enough dirt on it, but that's ok, because now the mushroom can spread its spores.

During one of the workshops at the recent Radical Mycology Convergence we got some king Stropharia (Stropharia rugosoannulata) spawn to take home to our gardens. We broke apart a bag of sawdust spawn and spread the crumbles over cardboard to multiply the amount of mycelium.  The cardboard had been soaked and then we removed one side of the cardboard to reveal the corrugations. After sprinkling with spawn we rolled the pieces of cardboard into burritos an put them in plastic bags to keep moist. Depending on temperature, a week or two later the cardboard is ready to go into the garden bed. King Stropharia is supposed to be a great companion for corn, so i put mine where i'll be planting corn next year. Of course, fungi doesn't like it when you till the soil, so keep that in mind when you choose a location. I'm not tilling my soil, so it's pretty easy. I had recently spread compost in the garden bed, and the spawn does best with soil/compost contact. I covered the myceliated cardboard with wood chips. Soon i will add a layer of leaves. We don't use paper or cardboard in our gardens at Wheaton Labs, so i will be removing the cardboard after the mycelium grows and gets settled into the wood chips.

I love to see these healthy mycelial threads as they leave the sawdust and grow over the cardboard.

Hopefully next year along with my corn i'll be harvesting some tasty king Stropharia mushrooms from the garden.

I ended up with a weed growing in a couple of the pots i started some seeds in. I recognized it from my garden in Minnesota, so i let it go. It is black nightshade (Solanum nigrum). The berries are edible when ripe and the leaves are edible when cooked. One of the volunteer starts did really well in the garden. It was the only thing the deer never touched. It even survived a few frosts. But, only a few of the berries had ripened and i wasn't sure how long it would survive with the temp dropping. So, i decided to pot it back up and put it in the wofati greenhouse. We'll see how it does in there over the winter. Maybe it will keep growing and start pumping out berries. It has a lot of unripe berries and flowers in different stages of pollination.

We've had a few frosts, a light dusting of snow, and there's not too many pollinators flying around, but some plants are still filled with hope! Here are a few of the late bloomers.

The first two photos are of spotted knapweed (Centaurea stoebe). Its peak bloom time has passed, but it keeps going until winter is well underway.

The third photo is mullein (Verbascum thapsus). It just keeps blooming and getting a little taller. The chipmunks are climbing these seed towers to fill their cheeks. The mullein seed weevil is munching away in the seed capsules. The woodpeckers are tapping away to extract those weevils. And still, the mullein is trying to make a few more seeds before winter ends the task.

The last photo is a mustard growing on one of the berms at the abbey. I think this is from our mustard seed mix. It is SPICY! The greens are liking this cool wet weather, and i'm liking the fresh addition to dinner.

More seeds!

I found some acorns of many varieties in Missoula. The first photo is of the various red oak acorns i found. The second photo is the white oak acorns. I tried to keep them separate because the white oak acorns usually need to be planted right away. Most of them will try to put down a root this fall in preparation for next year. The red oak acorns won't sprout at all until the spring. They generally have a lot more tannins in the acorn. This makes them taste bitter and encourages the squirrels and jays to bury them for later. The tannins leach out into the moist soil over the winter making them a tastier treat the later they get saved. Well, someone might decide to eat that squirrel over the winter and then all those acorns have a much better chance of becoming trees. I included a couple of mushrooms found under the trees on the off chance that they are mycorrhizal. They will continue to drop spores even after picked and some will end up on the acorns i am about to plant. This could give them easy access to a beneficial symbiotic partner.

The third photo is of the tulip poplar seeds i posted about earlier. Now they have dried out and separated into individual seeds. I calculated that there are 5283 seeds in this bowl. Hopefully some will grow! I will start a few in deep tree pots and the rest i will broadcast on my plot.

On my plot i found some honey mushrooms (Armillaria spp.). There were just a few little ones and i wasn't sure if i had the ID right, but i looked around and found more. Well, first i found a few spots where the squirrels had eaten all of the clump. These were all growing at the base of dead Doug fir trees, or their stumps. I found a couple of clumps intact and tried putting a cardboard box over it to see if i would help keep them from notice. It seems to have. The other clump was eaten completely and the ones under the box were left for me. I wanted them to get a little bigger, but i picked one to examine the stem and gill attachment. I took a cap home for a spore print to be sure of the ID. They were indeed the edible and delicious honey mushroom!

I wandered around the lab looking for more spots, but only found them growing in one other spot near the meadow.

People used to think there was just one species of honey mushroom...the Armillaria mellea. But recent years have shown us that there are several species (maybe 6 or 10) in the US. They all have slight variations in appearance or habits, but share enough that it isn't too hard to ID them. Foresters tend to not like them because they can kill trees. Ecologist tend to acknowledge that they are an important part of forest succession. You know, maybe we shouldn't have monocrop tree plantations with just Doug fir. At least, it seems that this fungus doesn't think so.

The largest organism in the world is a honey mushroom growing in Oregon that has a mycelial web that covers about 3.4 square miles and is around 2500 years old!