Monday 6 September 2010

Odd Jobs and mushrooms

This weekend Grandma and Grandad South came to visit so Garden Dad and Grandad South managed to get some odd jobs done. They fixed the garage roof which had sprung a leak, mowed the lawn, found a home for our roof box on the garage ceiling, finished mending Garden Dad's bike, fixed some broken toys and did some weeding.

Our Little Garden Helpers and I also got our mushroom logs started. I received some mushroom plugs for Christmas but we never managed to find any freshly cut logs to put them in, so when we ordered our replacement worms we also ordered some ready plugged mushroom logs. I am too nervous about poisoning everyone to actually go foraging for mushrooms, so home-grown ones seemed a like a good option. We had to shock them to get them going, so we went to the shop to buy a couple of bags of ice which we had to put into standing water. Rather than waste water I decided to put them straight into the water butt.

Then we needed to drop the logs from a couple of feet which I asked Garden Girl and Garden Boy to do for me.

This shocks the mushrooms into starting to fruit, but to give them an even better start, they also need to be added to the ice cold water for 48 hours.

Then all you need to do is remove them from the water and keep them in a cool, shady part of the garden. They grow best when kept moist so it is worth checking on them every now and them to make sure they haven't dried out. We should have mushrooms to harvest in 2-3 weeks.

4 comments:

  1. How exciting, where did you get them from?

    ReplyDelete
  2. Hi, We bought the mushroom logs from wiggly wigglers at www.wigglywigglers.co.uk Its a great place to buy garden stuff.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Interesting- what sort of mushrooms? Here you can buy boxes with mushroom spores, of the boring white mushroom variety. Or pine logs for shiitake mushrooms, I think.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Hi _vTg_ They are shitake and oyster mushrooms. Must check on them and see how they are growing.

    ReplyDelete