Mycelium in the Garden - Part 1

Mycelium in the Garden - Part 1

Gardeners often freak out when they see toadstools growing in their garden.

But it doesn't have to be that way. In fact, if we replace "toadstools" with edible mushrooms then we have created another stream of productivity while at the same time fill a decomposition function within the landscape.

This post is about my experiments with mycelium not just as a source of tasty mushrooms, but as a decomposition accelerator in my sheet mulching system.

But doesn't accelerating sheet mulch decomposition mean you have to replace it more often I hear you ask? Well, yes it does. But the reason I sheet mulch is keep plant competition down, regulate soil moisture, and encourage soil biodiversity.

I actually want my soil to eat the sheet mulch and incorporate all those nutrients and organic matter into the humus. Since my sheet mulch contains a lot of woody material it makes sense that a wood eating organism will do the job for me.

I started with a used straw log that commercial mushroom growers use to grow primary decomposers like oyster mushrooms in. I could have used spawn, or a slurry, but this is what I had available to me locally.

Since the log contained oyster mushroom mycelium, I decided to incorporate used coffee grounds into the sheet mulch bed. I collected a week's worth of used coffee grounds from a local coffee shop and stored them in sealed 5 gallon pails to prevent molding.

The 4ft wide garden bed I was working with had about 6ft of available space. It had some old newspaper and straw from last season on top of the soil, and I spread out the 15 gallons of used coffee grounds as my base layer directly on top.


Next, I cut the plastic off the straw log, and sliced it up into disks about 2 inches thick. These I placed on top of the coffee grounds as shown in the images below:

After this, I layered newspaper over the top of the disks and gave it a good watering:

Finally, I covered everything up with a deep layer of hay and gave it a final watering.

Stay tuned to see how this experiment in active sheet mulching turns out! 

High Productivity in Dry Conditions - Part 2

High Productivity in Dry Conditions - Part 2

In part 1 of this blog post series, I talked about a design for growing water hungry plants in dry conditions.

In this post, I thought I would share my experience installing some of these in my own garden to see how they go.

My garden beds are 48'' wide double-reach beds, so a 48'' diameter circle bed was the natural choice for this project.

I chose an area that has not been touched this season, and was overgrown with horsetail, chickweed, lambs quarters, and grass.

I started by digging a hole in the middle of the garden bed, and building up a doughnut shape of soil. I pulled the biggest plants out and left the rest in there as you can see from the photo to the right.

It was a rough as guts installation, and took less than 5 minutes. I then scrunched up the plants I pulled previously, and stuffed them into the bottom of the hole.

I patted the soil and shaped it a bit to make sure I had a solid ring into which I will plant the seedlings later.

After that, I took some garden debris from last year and filled the hole with it.

The next step was to cover the entire thing in newspaper. Each placement you see in the photo is approximately 6 sheets of newspaper thick, and I started at the base and worked my way into the center, making sure there was a good overlap.

This will act to keep moisture in the soil, and prevent any unwanted plants taking over.

I also made sure there was a ready pathway for water to enter through in the center of the circle.

I watered the paper down to make it all stick together, and topped it off with some semi-finished compost.



Finally, I covered the entire thing with a thick blanket of old straw and gave it a good watering.

I made two more of these. One that used hay instead of straw to see if it really makes that much of a difference.

And the final one is positioned under a tree where it receives lots of sun but very little water. 

In fact, it is so dry, and the soil so sandy, that I couldn't really form a decent doughnut shape because the soil wouldn't stay in place.

This spot barely grows anything except the odd dandelion and some grass. It's a very difficult corner of the garden and so it will be a great test location for the circle garden.

High Productivity in Dry Conditions

High Productivity in Dry Conditions

The spring of 2018 has turned out to be unusually dry, and it's now pretty safe to say that the spring rains never came.

It was also an unusually cold start to spring which delayed everything by a few weeks.

The long term climate forecast models used for things like commodities markets, launching rockets into space, and other critical sectors of human activity are pointing to a continuation of the global cooling trend that has been in place for the past decade or so.

The geopolitical implications of this, should it come to fruition, isn't the topic for today. Rather, I thought it would be good to write about some techniques that can be employed in the garden if this exceptional dryness becomes the norm.

Hopefully by now everyone should be aware of the benefits of mulching and how it reduces the need for watering by a factor of 10. Direct seeding in a mulched garden bed can be a challenge which means that more often than not a mulched garden bed also means seedling transplants.

But let's focus on mulching systems as a means to conserve water and hold nutrients within the system longer.

The image to the right is a banana circle. It is a mulching system used in the tropics for the production of bananas, and it has been reported to produce 100 times more bananas per square meter than the traditional plantation method.

Pretty much every permaculturist knows what one of these are and how it's constructed so I'm not going into the details here.

But what if we can adapt the principles of a banana circle and apply them to the great white North?

The system is constructed by building a doughnut shape with your soil into which you will plant your crops. The middle of the doughnut is then filled with coarse unfinished compost / mulch and then the whole thing is covered in a thick layer of straw or hay.

Converting a 15 foot long double reach bed will yield roughly 50 square feet of growing space as illustrated above. I employ double reach beds in my garden, and find that 3 rows in the bed are manageable. 

This method delivers the same amount of growing space as I usually have, and there is the added bonus that I'm utilizing the center areas to finish off my compost from the year before. I have essentially stacked two functions into a space that I'm currently using to perform just one.

When you go to water the bed, you simply pour the water into the center area and let it wick into the growing bed from the center. No drip irrigation or sprinklers required. Just dump the water in there!

This system is suitable for water hungry plants like squash, melons, tomatoes, peas, beans etc.

Read Part 2 to follow my implementation of this concept.