The Mushroom Kingdom

I don't know about you, but mushrooms always make me think of Super Mario Bros.  It doesn't really matter what kind of mushrooms they are, I usually start humming the Mario theme song when I am cooking with them.  So when my husband decided we should start growing our very own 1-Ups, I was pretty excited!  I will give all the credit for the mushroom growing experiment to Kass.  The little I knew about Mycology was pretty stinky (have you ever been downwind of a commercial mushroom farm?), so it never would have occurred to me to grow our own mushrooms at home.

Once upon a time, when my not-yet-husband was unemployed, he would occasionally work with a friend who had a home remodeling business.  They were working on the home of the owner of Fungi Perfecti which is how he learned about Grow-Your-Own Mushroom Kits.  This was years ago, but he kept the idea rolling around in his head, and when we decided to start growing more of our own food, he decided it was the perfect time.  He ordered an indoor shiitake mushroom kit and a week or so later, what looked like a dirty, styrofoam cake, arrived at the door.

Shiny new mushroom kit.

Kass tenderly cared for his budding mushrooms, spraying them with rainwater and exclaiming over every millimeter of growth.  As forewarned in the instruction booklet, the first harvest was small, and he may have jumped the gun and eaten them a little early, but was overall happy with the product.  After harvesting the mushrooms, we let the cake dry out for a couple weeks, then soaked it overnight in cool rainwater and covered it in plastic (apparently tricking the spores into thinking an entire year has passed and it's spring again).  We subsequently forgot about it until a few days ago when we noticed it was covered in tiny mushrooms!  I guess the TLC wasn't strictly necessary (mushrooms do grow nicely all on their own in nature).

Ready for the harvest.

Usually for breakfast I eat either homemade granola or oatmeal, but this morning Kass and I were both off work with nowhere we had to be, so I decided to make us a hot breakfast as a treat.  I harvested the biggest of the mushrooms, pulled out some fresh eggs from our chickens, a Field Roast sausage and some Dubliner cheese and got to work.

Shiitake Field Roast Scrambled Eggs
Serves 2

Ingredients:
4 large eggs
1 large or 2-3 medium shiitake mushrooms
1 Field Roast smoked apple sage sausage
1 oz. shredded Dubliner cheese
3 second spritz of Cooking Spray

• 2 Tbsp Water
• Pinch Salt
• Ground Black Pepper to Taste

Crumble sausage into pieces and dice mushroom caps into 1/4" pieces. Heat a large skillet over medium-low heat and spray with cooking oil. Cook the sausage and mushrooms until the sausage starts to brown and the mushrooms reduce in size by half.  Meanwhile, scramble the eggs with the water, salt, pepper, and shredded Dubliner (or any hard, aged) cheese. Pour the egg mixture onto the sausage and mushrooms and let cook for 45-60 seconds without stirring. Turn the eggs in the pan a few times until three-fourths of the egg is solid and remove from the heat.  The egg will continue to cook for another minute or so.  Eat alone or paired with grits, toast, fresh fruit, biscuits, you name it!

Nutrition Facts per Serving: Calories 335 Total Fat 18.75g Cholesterol 442.5mg Sodium 677.75mg Carbohydrate 10.33g Fiber 2.17g Sugars 1.5g Protein 29.08g

What the heck is Tagro?

So after the mess of a garden we had last year (we grew a fantastic crop of grass!), we decided to build raised garden beds filled with Tagro, instead of doing all that pesky digging again.  We first laid down landscape fabric to keep the grass from growing between the beds and covered the walkways with wood chips.  When you are using reclaimed pallets for building material, none of the boxes are going to be the same size, so it makes it hard to mow between them.  Kass then went to pick up a couple yards of Tagro, or TAcoma GROw.  Tagro is the Class A biosolids produced from Tacoma's wastewater treatment plant, otherwise known as human manure.  It came highly recommended by Scott, who used it in raised beds in a previous gardening project.

"Old Blue" full of Tagro.

The use of biosolids in vegetable gardening is super controversial.  There are tons of people who swear by it and tons of people who speak against it's use.  We did the research and decided that the treatment process used is safe and tested regularly.  Most of the public outcry is against Class B biosolids being used for farming, which are not as, for lack of a better word, clean.  So getting around the "ick" factor and deciding on an environmentally friendly planting medium seemed like the way to go.

Transplanting strawberries to their new home.

So here's where we made our major mistake.  After getting about 2/3 of our boxes filled and about half of those planted, I took a look at the city's website and realized the sell two different products: Tagro Mix (what we bought) is for use as a fertilizer and Tagro Potting Soil is ready to use.  Oops!  Tagro Mix is a blend of biosolids, sand, and sawdust so it is pretty dense stuff!  So to partially remedy our mistake, in the boxes we hadn't planted yet, we took out some of the Tagro and replaced it with topsoil and added the rest to the remaining unfilled boxes.  For the ones that were already planted we are taking a "wait and see what happens" position.  From what we have read, the major problems could be water retention and too high levels of nutrients, which will mostly fix itself after a few crops pass through.  Hopefully nature will have it's way and it will all be fine, fingers crossed.  Everything is growing so far so good, except the kale, which had a hard time setting up its root structure and only a few seedlings made it past the seed leaves.  I did put in some more kale seeds on Monday so hopefully a few more will take.

So for better or worse, the garden is growing!

Looking better already!