Nanabush Food Forest Stories

This past fall was a big year for nut trees in the area. Its called a masting year. Its kind of cool, trees have a reproduction strategy to out-wit the typical consumers of their bounty. By only producing moderate amount of nuts, squirrels and the like do not have a population explosion. Then, once and a while (and likely also based on environmental factors), a nut tree will go loco, producing way more than typical years. And more interesting is that all nut trees in the area are in synch. So, 2013 was a masting year, and we tried our...

With the snow falling outside, its a good time to bring focus to some indoor mushroom cultivation. We’ve got some lovely pearl oyster mushrooms to enjoy! It’s important to stay on top of the oyster mushrooms, to harvest them before they begin to sporulate. From the time the mushroom begins to form on the growing media (straw in our case), its only a matter of days before its harvest time. With the right temperature, humidity and light levels, you end up with a really nice flush of mushrooms! Yay!

Though this rain may drown out some of our other crops, the mushroom logs are performing splendidly. We sat down to a nice meal of sautéed shiitake mushrooms last night. Since we have just established some logs, they aren’t all in full production mode so its seems clear that there will be little external sales of these babies yet… they are just too good to let go!

We had the pleasure of attending a workshop at the home of the mycologist Paul Stamets a couple of years ago, and he got us excited about medicinal mushrooms. From that prompting, we’ve incubated some Turkey Tail mushrooms, which are now starting to flush. There is an interesting article on how the Turkey Tail mushroom can boost the immune system, it was used with great success to support breast cancer patients in a clinical trial.X

Puttering through our Basecamp Food Forest, we are enjoying the experience of ‘discovering food’. We love Kogane cabbage, and could not find a source for more seeds, so we started the last of our saved seeds this year and let them all go to seed. We’ll be set for kimchi material now! They are the yellow flowers in the background. In the middle, a pleasant discovery of some alpine strawberries, with astralagus, wood sorrel and borage in the foreground. You could not ask for a happier mix of plants! The astralagus (a.k.a. milkvetch) fixes nitrogen and so helps feed the...