Mike Lafay

Anne Miller wrote:I am sorry that no one has replied.

Maybe folks did not know that stropharia are mushrooms.

I don't know too much about growing mushrooms with poly-culture.

At least you are having fun with this.

And remember that mushrooms improve soil fertility.

I did find this older thread that might be of interest:

https://permies.com/t/18653/Mushroom-polyculture

I've been interested into permaculture for almost a decade, trying things out seriously for 6 years now, so that mean I will try things that are less and less common knowledge. So it can be kind of expected that at some point less and less people have the answers. The topic you linked to talks about mushroom polyculture exclusively, but for now I plan to have them at different spots in the garden. I am not sure about how they would fare together, and if they would compete or collaborate, so I will have them in different beds. Too bad that the kit mentioned in the thread (the three amigos from fungi perfecti) is not sold anymore thus I can't know for sure what mushrooms they were selling.

Pete Podurgiel wrote:Hi Mike,

Sounds lke a good plan.  My raspberries and strawberries absolutly love woodchips, and so do my winecaps (king stropharia).  I think they have the potential to make for a nice guild.

Not so sure about adding oysters to the mix.  I grow them on logs, but never tried to do them "in the ground".  Winecaps are relatively easy to establish and produce in abundance. Seeing as you are limited in terms of woodchips, I woud recommend establishing the winecaps first so they dominate the new beds and are not in direct competition with other varieties.  Can you do the oysters on logs, perhaps?

I have no experience with nameko or enokitake, so I won't comment on those.

Interested to hear back on how it all works out for you - cheers!

It's interesting, because you too understood that I wanted to have different mushrooms, on the same bed. I am interested in different mushrooms, but so far I plan to have them in separate bed (you know, because otherwise, they might not have... mush room... for growing). But maybe at some point I'll try to mix in different myceliums and see how they fare; and it will probably happen anyway, if there are some spores flying around, or even colonized woodchips being moved around by animals.

Jeff Peter wrote:If you can't get a local arborist to dump a load of woodchips on your property, maybe a town nearby has their own forestry guys in the maintenance crews, and have a chip pile free for the taking.

My wild black raspberries do well with thick woodchip mulch. My chips get inoculated by the soil. So I miss out on a crop of edible fungus as well as many varieties of raspberries. However, I am learning to value the varieties that are native to my soil. They are proven survivors in my garden. I re-learned this lesson again this year when the volunteer tomatoes, kale, cilantro, lettuces, peppers, etc thrived in spite of the conditions that made my intentionally started garden struggle.
The volunteers all come from spoiled fruit, and from the plants I couldn't eat fast enough and went to seed.

Free black raspberries (enough in the freezer for a full year), free wood chips, free fungus ~ those all fit my budget.

I want to have mushrooms for next year, so I am a bit in a hurry and just bought or made the woodchips. But yeah, I'm sure there is somewhere I could get some for free, I will need to look for that. I'll need to have it organic however so that might make it a bit more complicated.

One idea I had was to find wild mushrooms, ideally the kind of mushroom you can eat more than once, and try to propagate them in the garden. There is a technique I saw, where you can use wet cardboard to propagate mycelium from species that thrive on wood. I tried it with the stropharia mycelium I bought, and it seems to be working well:



Since I might not have the time nor the expertise to find good mushroom around where I live, right now I am relying on cultivated strains. The day I am able to propagate from wild species will be a great day. But I'll do it one step at a time !

I too have some black raspberries, Black Jewels. I haven't found much other so far, but this year I will have at least 6 different varieties.

Hugo Morvan wrote:Raspberries grow easy in my granite soils in Central France. I'm interested to hear how you fare with all those differing varieties trying to span the whole growing season, as i'm looking for that trait in the apples and pears i'm grafting.
I have no experience with growing other mushrooms than red wine caps on soil. I've had them on my pathways when i still was using wood chips. That worked great! And as far as i know they're the only mycelium that can beat a lot of other wild mycelia long term. Wild mycelia being hyper adapted to local conditions and any given soil type/ food source , they will get the upper hand eventually. Most of our domesticated mycelia varieties were moddy coddled in vitro and selected for taste/ size/ color and shape more then competitiveness with wild meycelia... But... red winecap seems to be able make a lot of friends with plantroots, so i've read on the Permies (so it must be true then,giggle). Anyway i've moved a lot of raspberries into my treeguilds lately, as they try to take over my home garden and I have noticed many a times they have a web of mycelia around their roots, hopefully for you that your desired mycelia can make friends with your raspberries. Every variety will react differently usually, so with your experiment you'll have the chance of monitoring with which raspberry variety which mushroomtype can make a connection, which in itself is very nerdy important information!
And yes, it sucks not having a source of cheap woodchips. My neighbor farmer bought one for behind the tractor and we've used it twice. It sucked as well. Another farmer rents a guy with a serious broyeur that can handle oak trees whole (which i find terrible, but very impressive none-the-less). I hope to be able to get back into using that one day soon, because buying is not an option and many a times fully colonized with wild spores and mycelia allready.
Good continuation, will be following this thread.

I am not sure if any of the mushroom I will cultivate in the coming months have any affinity for roots symbiosis (so-called mycorrhizal mushrooms). If I find some, they will be wild foraged species, which is definitely something I want to try. By reading again about mushroom, I got reminded of one very important thing to do: set up the internet in the garden. Not the world wide web as we know it, but the "wood wide web". To put it simply and in a less cryptic way, mushroom mycelium does a lot in the soil, including transferring nutrients, water, and information. I am sure this will increase yields and soil quality. But so far none of the species I plan to add in the garden have mush affinity for symbiosis, they are mainly saprophytic and thus only eat dead stuff.

M.K. Dorje Sr. wrote:I've had great success growing raspberries in raised bed rows with king stropharia/winecaps in the wood chip mulch alongside them. I use unsprayed straw as a casing (mulch) layer on top of the wood chips. In fact, I think king stopharia is the best edible mushroom companion for raspberries (and visa versa).

But growing other edible mushrooms alongside your raspberries might be difficult for a beginner. For example, I've had very little luck with growing oysters in outdoor wood chip beds. But here's a video by Tony at Freshcap Mushrooms that shows exactly how to do it with straw without much effort:

As you can see, he grows the oysters on straw without companion plants in a well-shaded bed by themselves.

You might want to start your raspberry/stropharia or oyster project in late winter/early spring. I've had poor luck with starting outdoor mushroom projects in fall, including winecaps. Good luck and please let us know how it goes...

The stropharias are already started, some are in container and the others will be with the raspberries as soon as I finish preparing the spot. But I'll be sure to try again if it ends up not working. Straw will be more expensive for me right now, so I'll be mainly sticking to wood. Where did you put your outdoor mushrooms when they didn't succeed ? I have a few micro-climates, so I have a range of hotter/colder and wetter/dryer spot I can put them in.

Eric Hanson wrote:Mike, I am sorry that I missed this one earlier.

I think you have about the PERFECT conditions to grow Stropharia along with your raspberries.  Here is the reason:

Stropharia naturally like to grow on logs and woody debris that has fallen on the ground.  In fact, Stropharia really want to have some type of connection with the soil.  When I have grown Stropharia in the past, I have the best luck when I have grown on a bed of wood chips that is about 6" deep.  In that same bed I also grow tomatoes.  Stropharia thrive when they get some soil interaction, especially some interaction with some of the bacteria that you would normally find in good, healthy topsoil.  On top of that, Stropharia are somewhat of an oddball in that they don't need total shade in order to grow--they actually prefer a little, dappled sunlight.  When I grow with tomatoes, the tomatoes provide that nice, dappled shade which also helps keep the wood chips from drying out.  And as if that were not enough, when I went and pulled some tomato roots up, it was obvious that little fungal strands were intricately wrapped around the root hairs!  The next year I planted zucchini in the exact same holes with no additional fertilization whatsoever.  Amazingly, they were lush, green and incredibly abundant the next year--with no chemical fertilization added.  I attribute the fertility of the soil to the rich soil biome that the Stropharia built.

Everything that I have said about tomatoes should also work perfectly well for raspberries.  They give shade, you have a lowish mulch with plenty of ground contact.  I see very good results by combining these two.

Just as a warning, do NOT combine fungi.  Stropharia are kinda like the bullies in the playground in that they will aggressively wage a sort of chemical warfare against other fungi and the others will lose.  Oyster mushrooms will at least try to make a stand of it and might arm wrestle the Stropharia enough that neither will win.  But in a fair fight, Oysters will never beat out Stropharia.  

Stropharia are about the perfect starter mushroom and I am wholeheartedly enthusiastic about your plans.  In fact, I would love for you to keep up some progress so we can see what is going on.  Moreover, if you are really wanting to go down a rabbit hole, I suggest looking at a long-running thread I have HERE:

https://permies.com/t/82798/composting/composting-wood-chips-chicken-litter

This thread documents my progress from knowing basically nothing about mushrooms to at least having some basic competency.  I have kept a record so that others can learn from my successes and my more numerous mistakes.  Personally, I would love if you could document some of your progress there.


I wish you the very best of luck, and if you have any further questions, by all means, do not hesitate to reach out!




Eric

About 6'' was the recommendation I had for laying the woodchip beds. That's also an interesting experience you are sharing, because I was planning to have strawberries with the raspberries in the sunnier spots. Now I might be able to try out a bit of stropharia to see how it can handle it !

Again, I'll probably have different mushrooms in separate beds. But maybe at some point they'll colonize the other beds, and start a fungi war. The polyculture part of my question was mostly around having as many stuff around the raspberries. Knowing how mycelium colonize stuff, I didn't think that mixing up different species would be a nice idea. Hell, I'm not even sure about different mycellium of the same species !

I might have seen your thread in an earlier search. There's quite a lot of replies, I'll try to read it at some point. Having inputs over several years on a project is always something amazing.

Mmmh, I didn't expect no replies. Since mushroom season is upon us, I'll give everyone a pass.

So far, the plan is to make round, slightly elevated mounds, that I'm double-digging as per the Grow Biointensive method (added some manure on top of the grass before digigng); I'm going to dig the paths so that it add more topsoil there, and hopefully have less weeding to do. Some paths will be rarely used, so I'll put the bulk of the mulch there. I'll still laying some woodchips on top of the mound, so that it might still be colonized; however I'll leave an empty circle around the raspberries crown.

The whole thing extended itself too, I'm going to have an angle, 3m on one size, 4 on the other. The sunnier one, on the sunny side, will have some raspberries as ground cover. I'll still try to have some mushroom behind the canes, but I am less sure about how effective it will be.

I've also ran some numbers; the woodchips I can get are coming from the store, but with the price I'm getting them, I'm getting mushrooms, mulch, and new topsoil. Ideally I'd need free woodchips, but my wood chipper, a Ryobi one, is an expensive piece of trash. It's severely degraded about an intensive... two hours... of use. So until I can get it replaced and cycle the wood from the garden again, I'll stick to store bought woodchips.

Oyster mushooms, king stropharia, nameko, enokitake... I'm probably doing way too much, but I'm also having way too much fun.

Still, if anyone has any ideas or tips, feel free to contribute.

Mike, out.

Hello permies,

I've been working hardly (or hardly working sometimes...) on a permaculture design for my garden, in a 8b zone.

One of the things I want, and that seems possible as it's grown in the region, and I already had a few success in the garden, is raspberries.

Here's what I plan so far to do:

- Have some slightly raised beds where I have the raspberries in row
- Have several varieties so that I can both extend the growing season, test their taste, and see where individual variety might perform well and poorly
- Have as many species growing, both for better productivity, stacking functions, and to try and apply permaculture principles, such as how there's no empty space in nature
- Try to grow mushrooms around the raspberries too (King Stropharia, and possibly others such as Oyster Mushrooms

There might be a few things that can be opposite, and so I'm asking for your inputs.

Basically, I'd have slightly raised beds at least single-dug to improve texture and aerate, with composted horse manure, clay-ish soil from the path so that I can actually raise the beds properly. There would be a raspberry plant in there, 45cm away from its siblings. Now, depending on the spot in the garden, I'd either have wood chips around them, inoculated with mycelium, or strawberry plants. A few tansy, calendula, achilea... around as companions.

So, the mushroom would love humidity, but on the top of a raised bed (even if slightly raised), would it still be a good idea ? Would it be better to have the mycelium at the base of the beds, or maybe have most of it around the beds, a bit of it on the bed ?

The variety of raspberries that are going to be there will be Black Jewel, Marastar, Heritage, Fall Gold, Himbo Top and Little Sweet. I plan to plant them as soon as possible, in several days, maybe one or two weeks at most; I want them in the soil for the autumn to try to get something the coming year. The goal is to get enough raspberries per day to cover the whole season, about 125g per day.

What are your thoughts, on that mushroom addition, and possibly on the other things I've talked about ?

Thanks and have a nice day.

Matt McSpadden wrote:Hi Mike,
Do you know what kind of birds are causing the damage? The methods for small song birds would of course be different than say, Canadian geese :)

The solutions that I can think of off hand would be to increase the predators in the area and planting way more than they can eat/damage.

For smaller areas, I wonder if you could use some sort of net made from natural materials for short periods of time when the damage might be the most... just after transplanting or just before things get ripe?

Well, the good side of having a "small" urban garden is that there are no dragon-sized bird attacking my beds.

Basically, the birds are the size of common blackbirds for the digging types, and house sparrow for those attacking and eating my grain (which I forgot to talk about in the OP).

I have about 400 square feet of garden if we look at a map, of course in reality it's smaller; so I can't really put that much more plants. What kind of predators could be increased ?

I use nets to protect the grain, however for beds digging it's the first year I notice this behavior.

Anne Miller wrote:Since you mentioned permaculture design, I thought I would mention things that can be done that are functional as well as pretty.

There are voile bags with a drawstring that can be put over the individual fruit.

Have you tried wind chimes? Lots of them?

What about some flags or wind socks?  Lots of them?

How about some decoys?  Maybe an owl or two?

I am looking forward to all the other suggestions.

Of course, if the protection can have several use, it would be wonderful. Wind chimes could be an idea, it's the first time I'm hearing about this. I am not sure if it would scare the birds though but it could be worth a try.

I've read about fake owls, I could try.

So far, there seems to be less damage, thanks to the jute fabric. But it's not really scalable (or at least, if I can find something else that mean being able to have bigger mulch I'm all for it), and the advantage of jute is also its downside: it's biodegradable, so I won't be eating plastic bits, but I'll have to periodically replace them.

Hello permies,

I am finally doing a design of my garden, after several years of experimenting things here and there.

I noticed this year that I had damages from birds. Sometimes, I had plants that were literally unrooted, and of course if I didn't catch it immediately they would die in the sun.

I also added mulch to some beds and containers, only to have birds suddenly go in there and dig up everything, unrooting plants and just destroying everything.

So far, I have added some jute fabric with holes in it for the plants in container, and a bird net above the mulched growing bed. However, I want to know as many way possible, that do work, to keep bird damages to a minimum, especially since I will also have small fruits like raspberries at some point, and I don't plan on feeding the local wildlife who already take more than his share from the garden. I tried hanging CD, but the birds don't care. So far, only physical barrier seem to be working, but I am open to any solution, especially ones that don't involve having hideous plastic nets all over the place.

What would be a permaculture way of preventing birds damage ?

Seeing how the fruit looks like it has a little scorpion tail on the bottom, I think that would be it, thanks for the confirmation.

As a Jalapeno pepper is already hot for me, be sure that I'll try a tiny, tiny bit of that Carolina Reaper.

If you have any tips on actually using very hot peppers, I'm all ears, although I'll probably do some research on my own. I might dilute them a lot, in order to actually eat them at some point.

I will also dry them for storage, however would using an electric dehydrator with a fan be a bad idea ? I don't want to make my kitchen a no man's land; all I am sure off is that actually cooking them can be dangerous with the capsaicin being volatile. I saw a video which had me burst out laughing about the hottest curry in the world, where the cooks literally need gas masks to cook that curry.

Hello permies.

As a mature, reasonable adult, I decided last year to try a few hot peppers. I had a few Pimiento de Padron, as well as a few Jalapeno. I had a few seeds too of Habanero, and of the dreaded Carolina Reaper. Since there was basically no summer last year, I had no fruit on those later peppers; and so I decided to dig them, put them in pots and overwinter them inside. This is where I have a problem.

As you all know, one of the biggest lie in life we tell ourselves is, "of course I'm going to remember what I planted there". So, all I am sure of is that I dug up either Habanero or Carolina reaper.

This year, I decided to plant peppers but gradually increasing their strength, in the hope of improving my own capsaicin tolerance, something we all strive to do at some point in life. So I have planted Shishitu (barely a pepper), Purple Delight, Variegata, and Habanero Chocolate brown. So I have a few visual comparison available.

This is the plant I am wondering about: what variety do you think it is, between Habanero and Carolina Reaper ?

Fruits:

Better view of the leaves:


For reference, here is a plant I know is an Habanero (chocolate brown variety, whereas the Habanero from last year was just "Habanero", so it is possible that there are some difference between Chocolate Brown Habanero and "just" Habanero (with some Plenitude K432 grain amaranth that decided to photo bomb):



What are your thoughts ?

Yes, I can see it now. Thanks !

Okay, so I've been able to buy the podcast through the gumroad link, and it has been about 48h. It seems that I have not been added to the private forum. Can anyone do that please ? I've listened to the 3h podcast, I want to try to contribute some positive stuff.

I have also started eating kale again, and it seemed relevant to point that out.

Well, thanks a lot to you and your team for setting this up !

I will wait a few day until I get my pay (25$ was OK this month, 40$ won't fit). After that, I'll gladly use that link; maybe you'll want to add it to the original post if it is available for people in other countries. I can't be the only non-US guy who want to support you in some way and possibly contribute in other ways.

You are just sharing so much stuff, at some point I want to give something back or at least try. I can't fly over to Montana (if that's even where the permies HQ is located) to help physically in any way, so perhaps I'll be able to share interesting new stuff in that private forum. Hopefully, without coming on as the clueless guy who read a book that just happen to be exactly the opposite of what you are doing. I am quite good at cooking, working out and self-discipline o maybe that could be good subjects to exchange on.

In the meantime, thanks you for everything you do.