Making Soil Better with Mushrooms

When you dig up a plant, you get plant, roots and dirt.  If you take that plant away, you leave a hole.

In field nurseries or turf farms, we do that over and over and over and leave a big hole.  Filling that hole can be a big problem.  Buying top soil is expensive.  It is often poor quality or has weeds.

In our field nursery things are slightly different as our plants are small.  Nonetheless, every time we dig a plant, we leave a little hole.  Though we don’t see this immediately, put together, those little holes mean we need a lot of dirt.

In your home garden, that may not seem like an issue.  Except that is.  Every time you pick tomatoes, prune hedges and put leaves on the street, you’re leaving a less healthy dirt.  You’re taking away, in that veggie or trash, essential nutrients.

In our nursery and home garden, we’ve elected to replenish, to rebuild dirt not by adding fertilizer, but by enhancing natural processes.  Waste woodchips will become great soil.  In 18 months or so, I hope.  Mushrooms are our recyclers.  There’s a whole section on the details of how we do this in Deep Rooted Wisdom.

Preparation has taken a while; just this weekend, we started a big new area in the nursery and a small area in our home front yard.  I thought it would be fun to document the changes, growth and soil build up and have you all follow along.   This is going to be slow, so keep watching and I’ll keep posting pictures here.

Our mushroom is King Stroparia aka Garden Giant.  And we got spawn from Mushroom Mountain.[Not a valid template]